Item Sets and Organizations

Last Updated on November 17, 2022 by maximosecrets

You would no doubt have heard that Maximo has a multi-organization and multi-site data structure. You might have also learnt that an organization is used for data sharing and a site is used for data separation. If not, then try reading this article first http://maximosecrets.com/2016/11/27/organizations-and-sites/

A set is also used for data sharing. There are two types, Item and Company, and they allow sets of items or companies to be used across multiple organizations. Therefore, in the context of items, an item belongs to an item set and an organization belongs to only one item set.

There are three types of item and three applications to support them; Items, Service Items and Tools. Items are managed in the Item Master application, the other two have applications of the same name. When you are on a Purchase Requisition or other application where you can add a line with an item you will find that the Service Item is referred to as a Standard Service (STDSERVICE).

When you are defining your records in the Item Master application you are defining characteristics that would apply to all organizations that share the same item set. I hear you saying that I don’t want all my items to be available in all my organizations, well that is controlled by the status found in the action Item/Organization Details, supported by the ITEMORGINFO table. This is the level in which the item and organization come together, and which controls some aspects of storeroom inventory managed in the Inventory and Stocked Tools applications.

Storerooms, in which inventory reside (items and tools) exist at the Site level. A Site belongs to an Organization, the organizations referenced in the ITEMORGINFO table. Therefore, some aspects of what happens in Inventory, for example a storeroom item’s status or its stock category are initially controlled from the ITEMORGINFO table.

Service Items are not stocked, but to be used on Site level objects like a Purchase Order they do need an active status in the ITEMORGINFO table, the button found in the action Service Item/Organization Details allows you to change status.

I know that is tough to grasp, and I urge you to re-read and at each step in the text examine the diagram. There are going to be other articles on Item Statuses and Item Stock Categories where you will see a similar diagram which will help to reinforce these concepts.

Before I leave this subject there are a few points to mention:

Maximo is handling the entry of the records into the ITEMORGINFO table, there is no New Row or Delete Row buttons in the dialog for Item/Organization Details. There are default values for some of its few attributes, so in most cases you might be able to ignore this action entirely.

If you are loading item data, then make sure there is an ITEMORGINFO record for every item and every organization that belongs to the same item set. If it does not exist, then you will not be able to add the item to a storeroom in that organization.

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