A standard is the information a company uses to structure and classify its assets and keep track of equipment and materials. This information is comprised of uniform engineering criteria, rules, units of measure, dimensions, physical quantities, terms, principles, practices, materials, items, processes, equipment, parts, and components.
This structuring information is unique to a company, although much of this structural information and/or organizational ideas comes from existing standards, such as ANSI (American National Standards Institute), DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung), SSG (Svensk skogsindustrigruppen), IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) and ISO 15926, among others.
In IFS/Asset Design terms, a standard is a uniform set of classes, their relations, technical attributes, and object ID numbering scheme. In this respect, a standard is a set of configurations. A standard is the highest level in the design and is the starting point for configuring IFS/Asset Design.
A design parts standard is a common set of materials, equipment and components, among others. It is also a structured method of numbering design parts. A design part standard works in conjunction with and is owned by the standard. A design part standard is often directly taken from an existing standard (ANSI, DIN, SSG, etc.).
A plant is a part of the engineering or reengineering design and is made up of objects. Although a standard determines the object ID structure, it is the plant that owns the objects. A plant gets access to classes, class relations, and design parts through its parent standard. An object in one plant cannot be shared by another plant. However, multiple plants can be defined under one standard to enable the sharing of object data.
When working in IFS/Asset Design, you must specify a plant. This becomes the default plant and may be changed at a later time. Once a plant has been established it is possible to filter the users per plant. In doing so it is possible to regulate, alongside general plant details, which users will be allowed or restricted to set the chosen plant as their default plant. Users who are not defined for a particular plant will not be able to set the plant as the Default Plant, and as a result, will not be able to navigate the chosen plant either. When a new plant has been created all users are granted access by default for setting it as the Default Plant, unless this setting has been explicitly modified.