Maximo List Archive

From: therron (2018-09-24 19:54)

We're on the cusp of trying to roll out Maximo mobile to our techs (finally!). Everyone now has an iPhone, and the current plan is to use Everyplace. We don't have WiFi in every location we'd have work orders for, but we do have unlimited data plans for everyone, and pretty excellent coverage from our cell phone provider.

I'm hoping that anyone here willing to read all this will shoot holes in my plan, or tell me what you did that worked better:

Currently, everything we do is on paper. If we want to give a Tech a work order, we print it out and hand it to him. He likely, but not always, was identified as the Lead on the work order (the Supervisor should have put that, but we don't require it, for better or worse). Once the Tech has it, if other Techs were to work with him, they'd need the work order number also, so they could each record it on their own timesheets.

We're hoping to eliminate both the printed-out work order and the timesheet that each person turns in each day.

We do not have "planner" positions/people. Each "trade" (plumbing, HVAC, electrical, etc.) has a foreman/working supervisor, and they report directly to the Maintenance Director. So a pretty flat structure, Director --> Foreman --> Technician. As things happen during the day that mess up the plan -- Tech goes home sick, inclement weather, etc., there are conversations happening between Tech and Foreman that cause Techs to move from one job to another or to reprioritize what needs to get done today. That data isn't making it into Maximo, nor do I expect that it ever will. I don't know that we'd ever hire planners/schedulers.

We also don't have Maximo Scheduler, but that is a possibility if it were warranted. But that would imply putting people's work schedules in Maximo which. . .we don't do either. We have other software that is used by EVERY department (not just Maintenance and Maintenance-esque departments) to address work schedules, and another software for actual time worked/payroll. I'm a bit hard-pressed to tell people to do their job twice -- once in the other software, once in Maximo; and it doesn't look like I have any good options for importing/exporting it either (payroll software looks like it lacks import/export ability; scheduling software would require a ton of scrubbing to make it fit Maximo properly).

One of our desires is to keep it simple for the techs. A great many of them are not ever going to be super-skilled Maximo searchers. So we wanted to make it so they'd usually only see "their" work orders. But that's a challenge since, as I said earlier, a lot of times a work order that pertains to them is handled as a conversation and that data doesn't make it into Maximo. My current plan was to create an overly-complex Saved Query that would be the default for the technicians, as follows:

<the understood SELECT * FROM workorder WHERE>
--the work order status is APPR, INPRG, or WMATL; AND any of:
--my laborcode has an active Assignment on the Assignments tab, if there are any active Assignments; or
--if there are no active Assignments, then my personid is the Lead; or
--if there is no Lead and no active Assignments, then my personid is a member of the Work Group's resppartygroups.
--if there is no Work Group, no Lead, and no active Assignments, then my personid is a member of the Owner Group (and Owner Group will be a required field).


Then also create Saved Queries for "Open" (any status but COMP, CLOSE, and CAN) work orders for their trade, another for all "Open" work orders, another for All Records Not History, and the canned All Records. But using those means they'd need to search -- scary, unless there is someone there who already knows the work order number, and all the other tech is doing is entering the number -- like we would do now with the work order printout.


A technical problem I don't have a solution for yet is this: suppose Bill and Tom are told to go work on work order 456789. They both go, they both start their timer on Everyplace's UI. Then they need to stop their timers (they finish the job, or whatever other reason). Bill stops his timer and confirms his labor entry and saves. Tom's a little slower at that, and when he tries to save he gets the "Record has been updated by another user. Please refresh and try again." message. That's going to be annoying. Probably to the point they'd throw their iPhones in the ocean. And we're about 5 miles inland from the Bay.

I can't see Crews as being a viable solution, as we don't necessarily have predefined crews like I think they were thinking when they designed that. And I'm not a huge fan of how it works anyways. The only way I can think of to get past this is to require one person, a la the Lead, to enter Labor Reporting records for everyone there.

What do you all think?

Thanks in advance,

Travis Herron