Blog
Evolutionary Design explained
As I have already discussed in a previous post I always tend to adopt an Agile Development approach in my projects. My own motto is: Start Small, Grow Fast. I always use this as a very simple guiding principle when working on customer projects. Some months ago I came across this nice picture that perfectly explains the Evolutionary Design principle. We have to admit that the evolutionary approach can introduce some form of waste because sometimes we cannot reuse the components built in the previous iterations (you can’t use bicycle wheels on a car). However, it definitely allows to minimize a large upfront design investment and allows to deeply understand the real customer needs and expectations during the project. A better understanding of customer needs is most valuable return of the iterative approach.
January 27, 2015
Maximo 7.6 installation
Maximo 7.6 has a lot of interesting features. One of these is the new installation technology. Richard Lesses has published a useful set of articles with a step-by-step guide of how to install Maximo 7.6. Installing Maximo 7.6: A first look, part 1 Installing Maximo 7.6: A first look, part 2 Installing Maximo 7.6: A first look, part 3 Installing Maximo 7.6: A first look, part 4
January 7, 2015
Learn how to query data with SQL
Many times Maximo users and administrator lacks database skills. These are important in several situations: Write ‘where clause’ statements to filter data in Maximo UI. Develop complex SELECT statements to extract data from multiple tables when developing report. Optimize existing queries to solve performance issues. If you need to improve your SQL skills I suggest you to read few chapters of the SQL Getting Started guide of IBM DB2. This is not just for DB2, SQL syntax is quite similar across different database types.
November 27, 2014
Maximo Tranining presentations
Here are some nice presentations that I use during basic education sessions for new Maximo users. Introduction - PowerPoint - SlideShare Getting Started - PowerPoint - SlideShare Asset Management - PowerPoint - SlideShare Work Management - PowerPoint - SlideShare Inventory Management - PowerPoint - SlideShare I tried to use a pretty template and a common style across all of them. Feedback is welcome!
November 12, 2014
Maximo is the leader Enterprise Asset Management Software
Gartner has recently published its Magic Quadrant for Energy and Utilities Enterprise Asset Management Software and guess what? IBM Maximo Asset Management is positioned it the ‘Magic’ corner! Read the full report here.
November 6, 2014
Preventive Maintenance (PM) automatic work order generation
You probably know that Preventive Maintenance module in Maximo allows to schedule periodical maintenance activities in order to keep your assets running efficiently. In other words you can use the Preventive Maintenance to schedule the automatic generation of work orders. Work orders can be generated manually using the ‘Generate Work Orders’ action in the Preventive Maintenance application. A dialog will be displayed allowing to set the number of days in the future for which the work orders must be created.
October 30, 2014
How to display a domain description in an application
Some fields in Maximo are linked to a domain that allows to set its value from a predefined set of values. In some cases however, when the value does not provide enough information, you may wish to also display the description of the domain value that you have chosen. For example lets consider the STATUS field of the WORKORDER object. By default Maximo will not show the description associated to the work order status.
October 29, 2014
Use Long Description in a Communication Template
To add the long description to the message of an email sent through a communication template you have to perform a few configuration steps. The example below is related to WORKORDER object but can be applied to any main object. First of all you have to create a relationship in Database Configuration between the WORKORDER object and the LONGDESCRIPTION object. Launch Database Configuration and select the WORKORDER object. Open the Relationship tab and create a relationship with the following properties.
October 24, 2014
Inbound Web Service processing using XSL transformation
The title of this article is quite scaring right? Let’s describe the scenario… You have an external application that needs to query or update data in Maximo using a Web Service call. In the real world the outbound XML schema of the caller is different from the Maximo inbound interface. How can you transform the incoming request to the standard Maximo Web Service interface? This article describes how to use XSLT (EXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) to transform the inbound XML structure to a MIF-compliant one.
October 6, 2014
Maximo inbound Web Services tutorial
Web Services are the most flexible and powerful technology to integrate Maximo with other systems. In this article I will describe the steps required to configure an inbound Web Service to create or update assets. Setup test tool (SoapUI) To test the Web Service you need an application to simulate inbound HTTP calls. I strongly suggest to use SoapUI. It may seems complex at the beginning but is a very powerful and easy tool in the real world. You can download SoapUI client from here.
October 3, 2014