Tidbits : Going Nuclear....

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Well, in my nascent experience of supporting Maximo for Nuclear, I am coming across many issues which are very specific to the Nuclear industry. I hope to shed some light on these via my blogs.

One such issue which I came across recently was when trying to decommission a location on a Nuclear environment.

As you know, core Maximo allows a location to be decommissioned in the following cases:
1. Location is not referenced on any open WO.                       
2. Its not referenced on an open PR, PO, RFQ or Desktop requisition.
3. Its not present on any job plan or route.                        
4. Its not present on any PM.                                      

In the case of the client. they had a business case where in a nuclear power plant, a location may be open on an open WO(e.g documentation work) for years although it may actually be required to be decommissioned as it is  
not in use.  

This is a unique business case even amongst a Nuclear power client. Essentially, IBM is not going to change the existing functionality so this is working as designed.

Having said that, following options were considered :

1. Two related terms could be used for the Location record; DECOMMISSIONED, meaning physically no longer in the plant AND, RETIRED IN PLACE, which meant it was physically there but no longer part of the functional plant      

In any case, keeping a work order open for these Locations is not necessary or even mandatory from a (Nuclear) regulation point of view.

2. If the status quo is maintained (i.e WO remains open), the only other way might be to tweak the system and having an intermediate status between Operating and Decommissioned 
This will be a synonym of Operating but prevent creation of any new transactions once all existing transactions are COMP/CLOSE,

A cron can update these locations to DECOMISSIONED.

Caveat : 
For option 2, we do not have any concerns with a Synonym on the Location Status in order to get this process established, but we would not be able to define ALL the possible areas where a new "transaction" might occur that the client might need to block.