IBM® Maximo® for Service Providers delivers a suite of applications that manage customer agreements, service delivery, customer billing, and supplier contracts. Maximo for Service Providers fully supports service as a business. Maximo Service Provider meets the needs of clients who manage assets and services for customers, as a business, or clients who manage assets and services within an enterprise and bills internally for those services.
Maximo for Service Providers maintains the agreements that exist between a service provider and each customer. Customer agreements specify the maintenance services to perform. Each request for service is validated to ensure that the customer is entitled to the service under the requested conditions. The agreements also specify the prices to charge for these services. As maintenance activities are recorded, prices are calculated based on the pricing rules specified in the customer agreement. At the end of the billing period, all of the billing transaction are collected and added to bill batches for review. Recurring charges can be billed to customers automatically through billing schedules that are part of the customer agreement.
Response plans assign the person or group to handle each service request from a customer. A response plan selects the appropriate job plan to accomplish the requested work. The response plan sends notifications about the work in process to the appropriate people so that they can identify the next steps.
You can set up flexible billing and price schedules to bill your customers for the services that you provide. At scheduled intervals, the billing process extracts the calculated prices from work orders, tickets, and sales orders and collects them into billing batches. Bill batches are also created for recurring costs that are specified in billing schedules. You can choose the bills that you want to review and you can adjust the bill and prices as necessary. You can let your customers view parts of the billing batch so that they can pre-approve invoices that will be generated for the billing batch. After the adjustment and approval process is complete, the bill batch is forwarded to an external accounting system to prepare the customer invoices.
In Maximo for Service Providers, you configure security groups and data object restrictions to ensure that only authorized users can view information about customers. An employee of the service provider can see information relating to all of their assigned customers, but an employee of one of the customers can see only work orders for his or her company.