Good morning and welcome to Maximo Bite Size, a podcast on the functionality of Maximo Manage. Today is the first episode in the series on Asset Management and we will be discussing Location Types and Location Systems.
The Locations application is found in the Assets module and is a SiteA structural element of a Maximo database that is used for data separation. More level object. Remember that in Maximo’s multiple organizations and sites data structure, a site is for data separation, and an organization is for data sharing. Locations cannot be related to other locationsA physical place where assets exist and where work can be performed. More that exist in different sites, contain assets from other sites, or be referenced on work orders for other sites.
Location Types
Locations have a type but, in most cases, this will be set to OPERATING, a location where equipment (assets) operates.
VENDOR, SALVAGE and REPAIR are other location types where assets can be located but where they would not be operating. Vendor and Repair are used for external/internal asset repairs. A Salvage location is used as a repository of assets that may be broken up for spares or are waiting to be sold or scrapped.
LABOR and COURIER are inventory type locations, they act like storerooms and can maintain a balance of an item. They are sometimes referred to as transit storerooms to show who is responsible for transferred items before they reach their destination storeroom. LABOR type locations are sometimes used to register the stock held by a field service engineer who is working out of their van.
There are two other types of location. Every Site must have one and only one location of type HOLDING which is used for the receipt of goods waiting to be inspected or serialized, often this location is called RECEIVING. The final type of location is STOREROOM, which is used in Inventory, but storerooms cannot be created from the Locations application, the Storerooms application must be used instead.
Location Systems
Locations of type OPERATING can be added to a hierarchy or network System. In a network system a location can have multiple parents, in a hierarchy only one parent, except of course the location at the top of the hierarchy, which does not have a parent. An example of a location in a network system are the towers/pylons that support two electric circuits, each circuit is a parent location. When an outage is required on a circuit you can identify all the locations which belong to it.
An operating location can belong to multiple systems, either hierarchy systems or network systems. A location system is a means of grouping locations that share a common purpose. If there is a need for outage management then consider defining a system for the locations that would be offline during an outage.
You must create an operating location in your site before you can use the Manage Systems action to create a system for the site, and the first system created for the site must be marked as a Primary System, and this must be a hierarchy and not a network system.
If there are multiple physical sites, there may still be one Maximo site sharing a common primary hierarchy. Some organisations with dispersed assets will use the top levels of the primary location hierarchy to describe the regions and areas where physical sites exist. This works well if the regions and areas rarely change, but you need to consider the implications of changing many location records in the hierarchy if the region or area boundaries change.
Operating locations are most often used to contain physical assets that when operating provide a business function. Operating locations can be used to support a business function without the creation of assets, for example, lighting in an office block, this may be known by some Maximo clients as a functional position.
Some Maximo clients work with very few assets, they work almost entirely with functional positions, others may have very few locations, and some may have one asset for every location. Making the decision about how to model locations and assets in Maximo can be quite nuanced.
Locations and Assets can both be used on a work order, they both support meters and failure reporting, and both can have a classification and a specification of attributes. In Maximo, an asset has a serial number, can be used for recording downtime, and is supported by an asset template, and these are unique to assets. If an asset can be held in a storeroom, it may be taken out of a storeroom and swapped with another asset at an operating location.
Maximo tracks work order history against both the asset and the location where that asset resides. If a piece of equipment never enters a storeroom and does not have a serial number, then if you have already defined it as an operating location, you must ask yourself for what reason you also want to create an asset record for it. There may be genuine reasons for creating an additional record, but you should at least ask yourself what the asset record will be used for.
I hope you enjoyed this podcast and I look forward to seeing you back on the next episode when we will spend time on Service Addresses.
The music is called Busy City from the talented group called TrackTribe, please check them out on TrackTribe.Com, all one word.
Until another time, goodbye.
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