Maximo List Archive

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From: in2data (2012-01-18 23:06)

Hi,
With the flexibility in Maximo you could get a lot of different responses. What you are looking for is not usually something IT determines. It's the controllers, internal and external auditors and compliance with GAAP and laws like Sarbanes-Oxley that determines the ideal process.
We use almost all of the purchasing applications like PR, PO, Receipts, Invoices etc
We purchase over $20,000,000 a year in non-direct purchases. Direct purchases for production materials are entered directly into SAP not Maximo. Maximo is used for all other purchases.
Our basic process follows this brief outline. If I say the system does something that's usually an escalation I've put in place.
I turned on auditing for all of the purchasing related tables like PO, PO line, invoices, invoiceline etc The matrectrans and servrectrans do not need to be audited since they record all transactions and are basically an audit table. You need auditing to be able to see who did what and when to a purchase.
All accounts in the chart of accounts are assigned a manager and supervisor. I added those fields. The system lets me know if a manager or supervisor is not a valid active user account.
No users are allowed to be able to approve an invoice and also approve or receive a PO. The invoice approval users can only match invoices against receipts already made by someone else. I have an escalation in place to monitor the user security and if anyone is assigned invoice approval and receiving or PO approval I get an email. Even if they do this for just a second the audit tables are monitored for that brief violation of security. This actually happened once when corporate security decided to be lazy. They were very surprised when I called their supervisor at home that night and the supervisor called them. Amazing what you can do with a smart phone these days.
We may even break this down so a user can do only one step PO approval, PO receipt or invoice approval. But only one of those steps. Currently some users can approve a PO and receive that PO. Again the controllers and auditors are the ones determining this.
The system emails a notification to each manager and supervisor of each account anytime a PO is approved for any of their accounts. That way POs don't have to be segregated by the accounts a manager has. The email has a link right to that PO. Tehy also have tabs on their Start Centers that list POs approved the last day, 7 days, month and year for any accounts they manage. They also have various reports they can shedule to email them the PO information.
Users that are not the manager or supervisor of an account can approve POs for those accounts. The managers and supervisors still receive an email when this happens. We found that most of the time the managers and supervisors of accounts added no value in approving routine purchases.
Users have appropriate approval level limits for POs and invoices. Those are determined by the local site controller up to the limits imposed by corporate. There are also variance levels for those approvals set by corporate.
Anyone in the company can run a report at any time to see the performance to budget of any account and drill into the PO lines for those expenses. Believe me managers have learned not to walk into a meeting with the plant manager without first looking over this report.
AP matches the invoices to the PO receipts in Maximo. Unless it's an unusual invoice they do not get the manager to approve the invoice. The approval of the PO is approval to pay the invoice. If the costs do not match to the receipts within the variance limits then it gets kicked back to the user that approved the PO or the account manager/supervisor.
AP runs a report to show the invoices they need to input into SAP. Like Brian said Maximo does not do payments. Eventually we will create an integration point to SAP to push the invoice over directly from Maximo. Even with the double entry of invoices all of our sites have found that doing all of the matching in Maximo and then entering it into SAP saves them a lot of time. Several sites were reluctant to do this at first but everyone that complained about the double entries eventually came back and said it's much easier.
So you can use the tools in Maximo to set up just about any process you need to follow. It's up to others outside of IT to determine that process
By the way notice I never mentioned workflow. We don't use it because we found if it was in a workflow and something unusual happened or someone made a mistake then users did not remember what to do or the workflow stopped them dead.
Hope this gives you some ideas on what you can do with Maximo and purchasing.
Dave Bone
--- In MAXIMO@yahoogroups.com, Brian Swanson <brian_swanson@...> wrote:
>
> Our AP department is looking at using the Maximo Invoice module, but we
> have already found two stumbling blocks. Maximo doesn't do Check creation
> or EFT payment processing. If anyone using the Maximo Invoice module
> could share that would be helpful.. Especially Maximo 7.5 as there are
> new capabilities there.
>
> Thanks
>
>
>
> Brian Swanson
> Systems Analyst-Maximo
> Information Technology
>
>
> HermanMiller
>
>
>

Maximo Application Flowchart

From: Hollie Alexander (2012-01-18 00:06)

From: Jason Verly (2012-01-18 17:22)

From: Hollie Alexander (2012-01-18 20:58)

From: Brian Swanson (2012-01-18 16:04)

From: Hollie Alexander (2012-01-18 22:49)

From: in2data (2012-01-18 23:06)

From: Shannon Rotz (2012-01-19 02:21)