From the Maximo Support Desk - Expected Functionality Alert: PRLINE.REQUESTEDBY vs. PR.REQUESTEDBY Values

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Regular readers of this blog are aware that I publish articles of interest to Maximo users which often center around unexpected behaviors and workarounds to various scenarios in Maximo.  It would be fun to do a blog series which only deals with Maximo application behaviors that we expect to work one way, but actually work a different way.  (fun?)  Hey, my material comes straight from actual Maximo users!

Here is one such scenario that was presented to me recently by one of our customers.  As a Maximo application support engineer, these situations are brought to my attention directly by our customer base.  When this happens, I will test the scenario myself, and then usually speak directly to the development team and product designers to verify what the expected behavior is.  (sometimes a bug is found)

This situation can be observed in the Purchase Requisitions application.  As you know, there is a PR header (PR tab), and a PR Lines tab.  There is a "Requested By" field on both of these tabs.  The obvious implication is that the value entered on the PR tab, or on the PR Lines tab will be the same.  This is actually not the case...
 
These two fields are actually mapped to two different objects/attributes in the database.  On the PR tab, the field value is stored in the PR object, REQUESTEDBY attribute.  On the PR Lines tab, the "Requested By" field value is stored in the PRLINE object, REQUESTEDBY attribute.  So, these fields can have different stored values.

Additional Notes:

When entering a PR and changing the PR.REQUESTEDBY to someone else, the PRLINE.REQUESTEDBY does not follow the PR.REQUESTEDBY value; the value that will populate by default in the "Requested By" field on the PR tab will be the logged-in User who inserts the PR record.  Similarly, the "Requested By' field on the PR Lines tab will populate by default with the logged-in User who inserts the PR Line record(s).

There is also a field on the PR Lines tab for each row, "Entered By:"; this can be used to indicate the User who may have modified the PR Line since its initial entry.  In this scenario, the record will accurately show who inserted the row (Requested By) as well as who last modified it before Approval (Entered By), or vice-versa.

The summary is that The PRLINE.REQUESTEDBY field is intended to be defaulted to the the logged-in user, and it will not update, or get its default value from the PR.REQUESTEDBY field.  This behavior was different in a previous Maximo version (6.2.x), and it was determined that a common business usage case was that two different Users can open a PR, and add PR Lines.

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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