My car is about 4 years old and in need of serious
cleaning. With two young kids starting a
new school year, new activities and monsoon season apparently beginning in my
area, I haven’t had an opportunity to give the “family truckster” a good shine. This weekend was the perfect opportunity, so
I seized the moment and started by cleaning out the inside. As I started to clean the third row I bumped
a small button next to the seat and to my surprise out popped a cup
holder. As I said earlier I’ve owned
this car for 4 years and was unaware that this cup holder existed. Wow, I had to drag my wife outside and verify
this wasn’t some new feature she added last time the car was serviced. She also had no clue and was just as pleasantly
surprised. Now having an extra cup
holder is not cutting edge functionality but they do serve a purpose and can
come in very handy when you need them. This experience got me thinking, what other
cool new features have I maybe overlooked, not just with my car but my other
possessions. And when I got back to work
Monday I started thinking about Maximo and what simple features might be available
that users just didn’t know about and decided to write this blog to share one.
I believe most users, at this point, know that within the
asset application there is an option to associate a person to an asset
record. This can come in handy and is
normally used to designate either the primary user of the asset or the person
responsible for maintaining the asset.
This functionality has been around since 7.1. It’s primarily used for reporting, to help
route work-flow or sending notifications when changes to the asset have been
made or are being planned. For example
you can associate the air handling unit at a certain location to “Henry” the
HVAC service technician. By making this
assignment, an automated process can be set up to send Henry a notification
whenever a change to the asset occurs or whenever that asset is associated to a
work order or ticket. Having this
enables automated capabilities that will allow users to get the right
information to the right resources at the right time; this of course helps more
efficiently resolve any issues that might occur with this asset throughout its life cycle.
This capability is great but what if Henry is out sick the day
a notification is sent? The notification
will probably sit in Henry’s inbox until his return, which is not very efficient
and could even cause a delay resolving the issue. To avoid this scenario try instead using new
capability provided in Maximo 7.5 that allows an asset to be associated to one
or more person groups, instead of a specific person.
Having the ability to assign person groups provides more
flexibility for the following reasons.
- No longer
have to worry about the notification sitting in a specific person’s inbox
because the notifications and assignments can now be made to all the
members of the person group instead of only a specific person.
- Assignment
or notification can be made based on additional attributes that the person
groups/person relationship provides, such as the individual persons sequence
in the group or calendars and shifts.
- Ability
to assign multiple groups. For
example the group which maintains the asset (HVAC service technicians),
the group that owns the asset (Facilities) and group that approves repair
or replacement (Real Estate Operations).
All can play a role in assets life cycle.
- There
is significantly less maintenance required by the asset manager on the asset
record. This is because specific
persons my leave the company or be assigned to other areas. When this occurs assets records which
are associated with a specific person would need to be updated with a new
person or at a minimal have the existing person relationship removed. By associating the person group instead
of the person the asset manager no longer has to worry about these changes
because the person relationship is managed at the group level and not on
the asset.
Now there are still use cases where a specific person
association is needed and that functionality remains unchanged but the addition
and flexibility of optionally associating a person group will be beneficial for
most.
For additional information on new features of Maximo 7.5 see
the following link,
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/v49r1/topic/com.ibm.mam.doc/overview/whatsnewmam75.html
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