System as-built documentation with MxLoader

Many large clients require to deliver an as-built document as part of the deliverables to be produced before the go-live. This is typically a Word document where all the Maximo configurations must be listed and described. I think this document has little real value for several reasons:

1. It costs a lot of time and effort to be built
2. It is a manual activity based on a lot copy-paste operations and so it is subject to user error
3. The document will be soon become obsolete since configurations will change as soon as the solution goes in production
4. There no simple way to update it automatically
5. It does not allow to detect changes applied during a certain time frame

In this article I will propose a better approach to create and manage such document that can solve all the issues above. The technique leverages MxLoader to extract all the custom configurations into an Excel file.

The as-built Word document should be contain only the high-level description of the solution with pointers to the most relevant configurations such as workflows, custom applications, business rules, etc. Such document can reference specific configuration that are listed in a separate Excel file populated automatically using MxLoader.

The latest versions of MxLoader already provide templates for extracting system configurations from your Maximo server.

Add all the MxLoader sheets you need and add a where clause to export only the custom configurations. If you have used a common prefix for all the custom configurations, as the common best practice, the where clause should be something like this.

Don’t forget that you can also export all your automation scripts and report design files using the “FILETXT:” tag in the column header. See this example.

I typically run this MxLoader file every now and then and save it together with the exported files in a timestamped folder. This is useful as a backup of all the configurations and also allows to revert a bad configuration update if needed.