Maximo Reporting

Birt Report Request window text labels can be renamed.

You can find the IDs for those you wish to change and then change the values either in the Database or in Database Configuration application.

The values are stored in maxmessages db table. The following SQL query returns about 11 results:

select * from maxmessages where msggroup = 'reports' and msgkey like 'filedialogtab3-%'

To make changes in Database Configuration application, navigate to More Actions / Select Actions - Messages.

Message Group: reports
Message key: filedialogtab3-

The fields on the actual Report Request Page use the following  Message keys:

To:  reqpagetab2text1
Comments:    filedialogtab3-8
Subject: reqpagetab2text2

The message keys in the screenshot below, are used in the "Schedules" tab on the report list - where Scheduled Reports text labels can be modified.  

Maximo Inventory Insights optimizes inventory and ensure the availability of spare parts for the essential assets to the mission by exploiting the capabilities of the management of Maximo Asset Management stocks as the analytical power of IBM SPSS. It combines the ease of use of SaaS with the simplicity of an integrated analysis model and the sophistication of predictive technology to automatically optimize inventory in several countries, sites and stores.

Clippings

The user installs the lightweight data collector and implements the analysis environment. It performs the extraction of data scheduled intervals. This non-invasive process selects the existing Maximo inventory data required by the model, then exports them automatically to the hosted service from IBM. Get register for IBM Maximo Training from expert trainers.

Establishment of profiles of stock

Identifies the percentage of inventory items that include a timeout value, that is to say a key value required for the analysis of stock. Identifies the potentially blocked stock, stagnant or obsolete. Establishes a distribution profile of the cost of stock on all sites.

Prioritization of opportunities

Summarizes the financial impact of accepting optimized recommendations. Identifies the accounting costs and quantities of the main items that show a trend toward a surplus or a shortage of stock. Prioritizes adequate stock levels compared to the cost reduction, an adequate balance between inventory levels and reduce costs, or reduction of costs compared to adequate stock levels. Indicates the relative size of the book value of the stock on this website or this store to focus on the items with the most positive financial impact.

Focuses on items that are overstocked or have this tendency, or items that may soon be out of stock. Sort the reorder point recommendations for potential financial impact, name or website and accounting cost. Article presents the recommendations inventory by organization, site or store. Enroll now for free webinar on IBM Maximo Training - IBM Maximo Asset Management is an enterprise asset management (EAM). This webinar is conducted by Certified Maximo Working Professionals.

The user selects any recommendations or selects only the specific recommendations to accept. Place the items that the user selects from a selection list for confirmation. Automatically updates reorder points in the next scheduled synchronization with Maximo Asset Management. Manages a change log file in the Maximo Inventory Insights data collector. Source: Maximo4you

IBM Maximo Asset Management (or ‘Maximo’ in short) is an integrated key productivity tool and a database designed to manage all the asset types of an organization in one single solution platform. Maximo, built on a SOA(Service Oriented Architecture) delivers a complete view of all asset types, their locations and conditions, work processes that support them and also provides control, optimal planning, compliance capability and audit.

Maximo database provides crucial information about asset resources, their configuration, key attributes and their logical and physical relationships to other resources.

Using Maximo user interface, you can build Key Performance Indicators(KPI) to manage asset locations and their conditions, and generate automated action depending on the changes. You can create, monitor, notify, assign and report on important process components right from beginning to end point such as purchase orders, work orders, service desk tickets, including status, and so forth. For better productivity and communication in future aspects, you can add attachments, urls, pictures and maps to each task or record. All these aspects are detailed in IBM Maximo Training in a clear and precise manner.

Galvanic Presence Of Maximo In Oil & Gas Industry:

Maximo for oil & gas company adds a feather of industry-specific performance to Maximo Asset Management, by that delivering the following functionalities or capabilities that are designed to gear up operational excellence.

• Asset Management: Capable in handling detailed information of assets, which includes hierarchy modeling from enterprise to sub-assemblies, metering, condition monitoring, costing, hazards and precaution management, location management and rich work order history.

• Action Tracking: Actions that come out from internal reviews and regulatory audits are tracked and provides a procedure ensuring that the recommendations and findings of external and internal audits are tracked and managed to closure.

• Competency Management: Functionalities like adding, updating and modifying workforce competencies help in competency. Furthermore, Maximo for oil and gas can connect competency requirements and certificate requirements to permit and ensure identification and validation of competency requirements on work orders and job plans.

• Condition For Work: Maximo accumulates similar jobs that span group of assets, assets, individual locations and areas and helps in supporting opportunity maintenance. Finding out work that can be combined into unplanned or planned work can increase efficiency and equipment reliability.

• Control Of Work: Maximo ensures improvements in safety, communication , efficiency and collaboration between maintenance and operations through certificate requirements in work orders and job plans.

• Contract Management: Maximo solution provides many types of contracts for overhaul materials and services, repair and maintenance. Types of contracts are master contracts, lease and rental contracts, warranty contracts, payment schedules, purchase contracts, labour rate contracts and terms & conditions.

• Defect Elimination: An integrated approach of maximo enables the management eliminate mechanical defects. With this approach, maintenance and operations team can record machine defects in real time, providing a better communication between various domains and helps in ensuring high service levels.

• Calibration: Calibration processes are automated, allows traceability, helps in improving work planning and compliance management. With the explosion in the equipment devices, viewing of calibration work with other works helps in stimulating efficiency leading to positive impact on equipment reliability.

• GIS Spatial Integration: Many Oil and Gas companies use GIS(Graphical Information Systems) application for storing and recording asset information that is a valuable aspect for asset management system. IBM Maximo integrates with other GIS systems of the company to provide spatial visualization and analysis of asset objects and work. In addition, bidirectional data exchange of valuable work and asset information between the GIS system and IBM Maximo.

Apart from the above mentioned, there are other concentric areas like Procurement, Risk Analysis, Regulatory Compliance, Investigations, Incident Management, Failure reporting, IBM Integrated Information Framework Integration, Materials Management, Operator’s Log, Linear Asset Modeling, Risk Matrices and Solutions wherein Maximo is the reason for effective operational excellence achievement by Oil & Gas industry.

Conclusion:

Oil & Gas industry is a critical sector for any nation and Maximo is supporting this sector facing evolving and complex issues in operational processes. Maximo solution provides necessary Internet of Things (IoT) applications in collecting valuable information, knowledge, improving operational efficiency, operate and manage mission-critical assets productively and safely. As oil and gas companies are growing though at a slower rate, but have smarter software solutions like Maximo for new upcoming projects in this energy space.

Numbered lists in Birt reports do not in sync with Maximo Birt report output when working with a Maximo UI record that has a rtf formatted Long Description.
Unfortunately,  this cannot be resolved at IBM, as the issue is directly caused by BIRT, not Maximo code.

Create a rtf formatted longdescription, i.e. in Job Plans, like this:

1. Ordered List first line
   • sublist
2. Ordered List second line

Use the buttons for „Numbered List“, „Bullet List“ and „Indent“ to format text

Run a report which displays this longdescription, i.e. Job Plan Details:

The numbering differs between Maximo and Birt.

How can I let my report developers create and publish reports and ensure that these reports do not have a negative performance impact on my production database & UI?

We have created a couple methods to protect the UI from Report performance issues.

1. Birt Reporting Only Server (BROS) – With BROS, we force Immediate & Scheduled reports to be executed on a separate (non-UI) Maximo server. Page 10 V7 Report Performance Considerations http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21305031
2. Configuring a secondary database. Reports are configured to point to a secondary database. http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21304936 With this option, you can configure all reports or some reports to point to a secondary reporting database.

To configure some reports, (This leaves the Out of Box reports, including update reports pointing at Production) (See Page 8 of the Guide)

These users (or report developers) will have the Eclipse Report Designer installed locally. The Designer includes a properties file, mxreportdatasources.properties that points the report to the appropriate database. The default points to the Maximo primary db.  This can be changed from the default, to a secondary database.

maximoDataSource.url=jdbc:db2://localhost:50001/UDBPD

to

external.url=jdbc:db2://qadb04.usma.ibm.com:50000/db29winb

See page 9 of the guide for the complete data source entry.

After making the one time change in the properties file, each report will need to point to the new data source. Page 12.

<script-data-source name=”maximoDataSource” becomes <script-data-source name=”external”

Do my users have to make this change with every report? Yes, but if you edit the report templates to point to the correct datasource, each new report will automatically point to the correct Datasource.

Finally, you will need to tell Maximo about the new secondary database and datasource.  This is done under Report Admin, Configure Data Sources.

So, all reports uploaded by these users will be loaded to the Production database, but will report from the secondary (external) database.

You will need to provide these report writers with the following.

• An mxreportdatasources .properties file that points to the secondary database.
• An updated set of report templates that point to the secondary datasource.

Is there any way that these users can upload a report that points to the Production database?

To upload a report that point to production, these users would have to upload an existing report that points to prod or modify a new report so that it points to ‘maximoDataSource’. So it remains possible that a user could point a report to Production, but this would have to be intentional.

So, at this point, we have a strategy to create reports that will point to a secondary database. To take the remaining pressure off of the UI Server, you need to enable the BROS server.

The BROS server is just another Maximo server pointing at the same primary database. Any immediate or scheduled reports will run on this server. The UI server will still host QBR report Previews and any Direct Print reports.

In Summary.

#1 moves the report overhead off of the UI server, but still points to the Prod db.

#2 Points the custom reports at the secondary db, but leaves report processing on the UI.

Using both #1 & #2 ..
- Causes all reports to run on a BROS server ( with 7.5.0.x, Direct Print & QBR previews will still happen on the UI)
- Points all the custom reports to the Secondary db, All OOB reports go to primary db.

There is known issue with AdHoc reports in a multilingual environment.

It works like this.

A user, who is not using the Maximo primary language, creates and saves an Ad Hoc report.

In doing so, the user enters a report description. This is a required field and and is part of the search index for this report in the Select Actions / Run Reports window. 

The problem is that there is no Report Description entered for the Primary version of the report entry. If a user opens the Select Actions / Run Reports window in the primary language, they will see an error and be unable to search the report list. 

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg1IV18656

There are a couple ways to handle this.

If you do not have a lot of users creating AdHoc reports, the Administrator can add the Report Descriptions in Report Administration. If this task becomes too much to handle, you can create an Automation Script that will automatically populate the Primary Language Report Description.

Here are the values for creating this script.

Script Language: jython

Log Level: ERROR

Source Code

from psdi.mbo import MboConstants
from psdi.security import UserInfo

userLang = mbo.getUserInfo().getLangCode()

# If the current user is not a base language user, set a value on the base language description
if (userLang != baseLang):
  mbo.setMLValue("description", baseLang, mbo.getString("reportname"),MboConstants.NOACCESSCHECK)

This Script is specifically targeted the AdHoc issue. It is only triggered when saving a new report (as specified by the Add Option in Launch Points)

The Script uses the reportname as the default description. This could be modified if you prefer.

I was recently asked the question "Do you know if Maximo 7.5.0.7 supports Cognos 10.2.2"? 

The answer is no. 

To which the next question was "do you know if there's a web site / resource to show the supported version as the Maximo Product Matrix does not contain information on Cognos?"

Maximo Product Matrix

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/groups/service/html/communityview?communityUuid=a9ba1efe-b731-4317-9724-a181d6155e3a#fullpageWidgetId=W5f281fe58c09_49c7_9fa4_e094f86b7e98&file=3c3aa8d0-c1ac-48de-851e-13afeb258bba  

The EXT_Platform_Matrix.xls is the document which contains the confirmation that Maximo 750x only supports upto Version 10.1.1 .

EXT_Platform_Matrix.xls 
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/groups/service/html/communityview?communityUuid=a9ba1efe-b731-4317-9724-a181d6155e3a#fullpageWidgetId=W5f281fe58c09_49c7_9fa4_e094f86b7e98&file=97d773e7-2177-4c0a-8b6b-170374718f9e 
 
Also, the Maximo 76 BI Server 10.2.1 Installation Guide states that  Maximo 76 uses Cognos 10.2.1 .

As a support analyst, one of the first reports that you become familiar with is the Maintenance Cost Rollup report. In the past this report has been known as the Asset Cost Rollup and going way back to Maximo 4, DBRollup.

The Cost Rollup report is actually 2 separate reports. Since this was introduced, the report acts basically the same. It's primary function is to update the the Asset Year to Date & Total Costs fields in the Asset Record.

These costs include the following.

• Labor charges to Assets (either charged directly to the Asset or to a Workorder assigned to that Asset)
• Material Issues (Either Inventory issues or items purchased directly against the Workorder)
• Service Charges
• Tool Charges

Given that this report updates the YTD Total Charges in the Asset, one would think that this report would be run on a frequent basis.. (so that the YTD Totals reflect current values). Unfortunately, that is not what happens.  I think that folks get busy with the day to day operations of the software and forget about this report. In the past, it is not uncommon for people to forget about this until they are performing their year end activities. By this time, they have accumulated a ton of transactions.

With any database operation, the more data that needs to be searched & updated the longer it takes and the greater resource burden it becomes. Occasionally, you may find that the report will just not complete any more. If you in this situation, you will need to break the transactions down into smaller chunks.

You can get the Rollup and Rollup Update reports to filter on the Asset Location in the Report Request page. You will need to to add the location parameter to both reports for this to work. You can run either report, but if you just want to rollup the transactions you need only run the update report. When setting up the Location parameter, set it to allow multiple values (so you can update multiple locations) and set it to Not Required.

The idea here is to run the Update report against some of your larger locations first. Later you can run it against several smaller locations at a time, and finally run with no parameter to run on the balance of the locations.

The following SQL will give you a rough idea of what locations have the most non rolled up transactions.

Select siteid, location, loc_total from (
    select siteid, location, count(*) as loc_total
    from matusetrans
    where rollup = 0 and assetnum is not null        
    group by Orgid, siteid, location
    order by Orgid, Siteid
)
order by loc_total desc

Select siteid, location, assetnum, site_total
from (    
select siteid, location, assetnum, count(*) site_total
    from labtrans
    where rollup = 0 and assetnum is not null      
    group by Orgid, siteid, location, assetnum
    order by Orgid, Siteid, location
    )
order by site_total DESC

One of the benefits of BIRT reporting in Maximo is that our users can generate all manner of reports that put the accumulated Maximo data in perspective.

This ranges from transaction reports like the Work Order Detail report to high level reports (Asset Cost Rollup) that summarize vast swaths of Maximo Data.. Add to this, custom reports and the reporting possibilities are endless.

However, this does come at a cost. The Work Order Detail report uses 17 different SQL statements (or more) and operates on a table that is typically huge. The Asset Cost Rollup report summarizes Labor, Materials, Services & Tool costs assigned to closed Work Orders. In the past it has not been uncommon for this report to run over several days. All this activity consumes server resources.

If you have been using Maximo for some time, you will remember some of the lessons learned in the past. In Maximo 5, we found that users could run the Work Order Detail report against all the Workorders in the database. If you ran this a couple times in a row, you would be successful in overloading the UI server to the point that it crashed.

In an effort to protect the UI server, we added some features..

• We allowed administrators to limit the number of records that these reports can run against.
• We allowed users to run reports on on a Birt Reporting Only Server (BROS) and remove the load from the UI server.

There were some limitations (Direct Print reports still run on the UI Server), but generally, this approach was successful. 

Later we introduced AdHoc reporting. This allows users with limited technical ability to create reports. Unfortunately, only AdHoc reports that have been saved and are run from Select Actions / Run Reports run on the BROS. Previewing AdHoc Reports from the AdHoc Query Tool, runs on the UI server. This puts these non technical users in a position to seriously impact the UI server performance. This led to the introduction of the mxe.report.adhoc.previewLimit property.

This property while configurable, defaults at 50 records. The best practice is to give your users enough data to develop their report. Once the report is saved, the Administrator can assign a specific record limit (or none at all) to the saved QBR report. This report, when run, will execute on the Birt Reporting Only Server.

In summary, to protect your UI server from overload by reporting tasks, you want to do the following.

Limit the reporting load on the UI server. This includes Direct Print reports and the number of records that can be run on Direct Print reports. This also includes the number of reports that can be run on a server. This can be limited by the system property mxe.report.birt.maxconcurrentrun.

Limit the number of records that can be previewed on the UI server in the QBR (AdHoc) builder. This is the mxe.report.adhoc.previewLimit property.

For more information see the QBR (AdHoc) Reporting and Report Object Structures Guide Page 68

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21498285

If your looking for the right approach to migrate your own developed Cognos reports from one environment to another, here is a bunch of links that cover the process involved.                                             
                                                                        
So lets use the scenario where  you have developed some reports a in Development environment and now   
want to move them to a UAT or Production environment, how do you go about doing that?
                                                                        
The recommended process is to create a deployment of the reports to be transferred, then import this deployment into the target environment.   
                                                                        
The process is covered in the following Cognos documentation ;          
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSEP7J_10.2.2/com.ibm.swg.ba.cognos.ug_cra.10.2.2.doc/c_deployment.html%23Deployment?lang=en      
                                                                        
Specific process and links:                

Deploying IBM Cognos Entries                           
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSEP7J_10.2.2/com.ibm.swg.ba.cognos.ug_cra.10.2.2.doc/c_deployingdata.html%23DeployingData?lang=en
      

Deploying Selected Public Folders and Directory Content                                  
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSEP7J_10.2.2/com.ibm.swg.ba.cognos.ug_cra.10.2.2.doc/c_deploying_folders_and_directory.html%23deploying_folders_and_directory?lang=en                              
                                                                                                                                              
There is also a proven practices article on this at:   

IBM Cognos Proven Practices: IBM Cognos BI Deploy Content Between Environments                    
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/cognos/infrastructure/cognos_specific/page581.html                                        

As a Maximo administrator you might notice the accumulation of temporary BIRT files on your TPAE/Maximo server. As this can consume the free diskspace on the server, this can be a serious issue. These temporary files are created by BIRT at the report execution time. Usually they are removed when the report completes.

The resolution to this is to direct the output to a specific folder so that it does not interfere with the performance of the Maximo JVM.

This can be done by adding a parameter to the Generic Java Parameters in either WebSphere or WebLogic.

eg. Dmxe.report.birt.tempfolder=c:\tempReport\BIRTTEMP

This process varies in WebLogic and Websphere, but in both cases, the Directory Path to this folder should contain no spaces,

For detailed steps to setting this up in WAS, see page 25 in the V 7.5 Report Feature Guide mentioned at the link below.

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21498433

For further information see.

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21505258