Using Spreadsheets to manage and report Maximo data

Customers often have the need and/or desire to work with data in a spreadsheet format because of the usability of applications such as Excel.  With release 7.5 of Maximo, users can now have their applications enabled to support the export and import of data into a delimited file format (.csv) that lets them view and manage that data in Excel.

A Maximo user whose job it is to manage a company’s asset master data can have a feature where they are in the asset application and can export asset information, such as assets and their specification attributes, to be used in a spreadsheet report that they have built.  Leveraging existing asset queries they have built for different views of the asset data, they can export those views into separate spreadsheets as needed.

Additionally, this user could perform updates to that data in the spreadsheet and then import those updates directly from the asset application.  This would allow the user to perform mass updates across many assets in a spreadsheet rather than pulling up individual records in the asset application one at a time.

As a Maximo administrator, you may already support your users importing spreadsheet data into Maximo but it requires that you perform the actual import since it is only available in an administrative application (External Systems application).  This new feature will alleviate you from that task as you can let the end users directly responsible for that data to perform the exporting and importing tasks.  This approach could also be leveraged where you currently get regular integration feeds from other systems in a spreadsheet format.  By allowing the users who know the data the best do the importing, they will be able to correct any data problems as they are identified and the data integration will be completed in a timely manner.

Before using this new feature you should check out the enablement document on the Maximo Asset Management Wiki.  It covers complete details on both the enablement steps done by the Maximo administrator and the actual execution done the application users.

Use this link http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/maximo/Maximo+Asset+Management

In the Navigation panel on the left, click on Integration and then select ‘Importing and exporting data from applications’ to download the PDF document.