From the Maximo Support Desk - Is the Manufacturer field validated against the Companies table?

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Maximo Users have observed that the value in the Manufacturer field on Inventory records can be free form text, and is otherwise not validated against any table or lookup.  I took the liberty of verifying what the expected behavior of this field is in regards to company records, or any intended validation of values that can be entered into this field.

My findings are that it is by intentional design that Maximo does not validate the MANUFACTURER column against the COMPANIES table.  Values may be entered in the Manufacturer field which do not exist in the COMPANIES table.  The manufacturer field in the Inventory application is mapped to the INVVENDOR object, and it is not an attribute in the COMPANIES object.

It is possible to add a MANUFACTURER field as an informational field in the COMPANIES table, and it would also be possible to store all of your Manufacturers as Company records; in this scenario, the Manufacturer field could use the COMPANIES lookup exclusively, and then any entry would be validated.  These suggestions are not part of an "out of the box" Maximo installation, but some Maximo clients have implemented such components.

The summary is that the value in the Manufacturer field does not need to be a valid value in the Companies table, and this is the expected behavior for MANUFACTURER columns throughout Maximo.

Tom Richardson is an IBM Maximo Support Engineer and frequent contributor to the Asset Management Blog community.  For a complete index of links to his articles, visit
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