Good afternoon and welcome to Maximo Bite Size, a podcast on the functionality of Maximo Manage. Today is the ninth episode in the series on Asset Management and we will be discussing Location and Asset Associations.
Locations and Assets can be associated with other records. Sometimes the association is made from the List tab of the application.
Associate Users and Custodians
The Associate Users and Custodians is used to associate a person with a location or asset. For Assets one or more Person Groups can be associated. The Person must exist in Maximo and when selected must be marked as either a User, a Custodian or both. One and only one of the associations must be marked as the Primary association for the location or asset. For assets, and Person Group associations there is only a Primary field.
A custodian implies ownership/responsibility of the location or asset rather than just usage. The Primary field might indicate the responsibility of the location or asset. You might find a different use to the meaning of primary, custodian, and user.
In the People application the associations can be viewed from the other perspective using the action ‘View Related Assets and Locations’. There is no similar action on the Person Groups application.
The Users and Custodians feature is used on the asset and location fields of a Service Request. The Select Value on these fields shows those locationsA physical place where assets exist and where work can be performed. More or assets where the affected person is either a user or custodian. The same dialog allows you to select ‘Public’ assets or locations, records with no associated users or custodians, or ‘All’ assets or locations. The functionality was originally created to make it easier for a self-service Service Request user to find the assets or locations they normally work with or are responsible for, or for a Service Desk user receiving a call to quickly find the locations and assets for the Affected Person.
On the Assets application the Move/Modify Assets action works with a selected set of assets on the List tab to make mass user/custodian and person group changes. There is no action for mass modifying users and custodians on the Locations application.
However, in the Work Order Tracking application, the Move/Swap/Modify action can be used to add, modify, and remove user and custodian changes on multiple locations and assets, and to save the plan of changes and later execute that plan.
Associate Services
There is a two-level hierarchy of Service Groups and Services defined in either the Service Groups application or from the action Add/Modify Commodity Codes which will be found in many of the applications in the Inventory and Purchasing modules. In this case the commodity groups/codes are marked as a Service.
When defining a Service Group or Service Code you set the type to PROVIDE, PROCURE or BOTH, which means that you can both provide and procure this service. Most often, for the records set here, the type will be PROVIDE, service management provides services to the organisation.
Service Groups and their Service Codes provide a reporting layer for service management, and they reach across several applications, Tickets, Work Orders, Locations, Assets, Asset Types, Service Level Agreements, Contracts and Configuration Items. These are the applications associated with providing services, and not procuring services. Notice, there is no reference to Service Items which are used in procurement, and not the provision of services.
You use the action Associate Services to identify the locations and assets that provide a particular service. You can do this from the Service Groups application and action Associate Assets/Locations where multiple locations and assets can be selected. Therefore, the Associate Services action will most often be used to view the associations already created and make changes.
The Associate Services action is restricted to the creation of Service Group and Service Code associations that are set as PROVIDE, or BOTH. The Service Groups and Service Codes that are set as PROCURE cannot be associated from the Locations and Assets applications. However, there is an anomaly in that a Service Group/Service of type PROCURE can be associated with a location or asset when the association is made from the Service Groups application.
When using the Associate Services action from the Locations and Assets applications just consider what Services the location or asset provides.
Associate Inspection Form
Inspection Forms are defined in the Work Center application Manage Inspection Forms, and they can be associated with a Job Plan, a Route Stop, or several places in the Work Order Tracking application.
You use the Associate Inspection Form action in the Locations and Assets application to create the recommended set of inspection forms for the location or asset. The action is available from the List tab to associate multiple records with the inspection form in one action.
When you are in the Routes or Work Order Tracking applications the Select Value in the Inspection Form field will have two table windows. For example, on a Route Stop the top table window shows the Recommended Forms, which are those inspection forms where you have made an association with the location or asset on the same route stop. The bottom table window shows other active inspection forms. The same dialog is used throughout the Work Order Tracking application.
The action Create Unscheduled Inspection in the Locations and Assets application and the button Select Inspection Form shows the same dialog where the top table window shows the Recommended Forms for the location or asset.
When a user is using the Conduct an Inspection Work Center and has used the Unscheduled Inspection button, the default is to show the recommended inspection forms for the selected location or asset, although you can toggle to show All inspection forms.
Associate Work Zones
Work Zones are used in Maximo to define areas in which locations and assets reside and in which labor and crews work.
Work zones are used to default labor and crews to work assignments within their assigned work zones and working on the assets and locations that reside in those work zones. In short, they help to reduce travel time and are applicable for work across geographically dispersed locations and assets, or on large sites like refineries and airports where getting from one area to another can take time.
In the Locations and Assets application there is a Work Zone tab with a table window. A location or asset can only belong to one work zone in each work zone type. There might be multiple purposes for work zones in an organisation, for example a water utility may have different work zones for above ground assets, below ground assets, and another for leak detection, they may have three work zone types in this example.
You can make the association to a work zone from the List tab of the Locations and Assets application and apply a work zone to multiple records in one action.
The Work Zones application is found in the Administration Module and Resources sub-module. Work Zones are defined at the Organization level. The Work Zone Type is an ALN Domain.
In the OrganizationsA structural element of a Maximo database which is used for data sharing and is often aligned to a legal entity of an organisation. More application, Work Order Options, and the action Other Organization Options there is a field called ‘Warn if Assigned Outside of Work Zone?’ which when set will provide a warning when you make a work assignment in the Assignments tab of Work Order Tracking application if you are assigning a labor or crew to work on a location or asset that is not in their default work zone.
Implementing work zones for locations and assets will use the derived work zone as a filter in the Available Labor and Available Crews dialogs on the Assignments tab of the Work Order Tracking application, filtering the labor and crews that belong to the same work zone. If the work order has a location and asset which have different work zones, then the work zone of the asset takes priority.
Associate Time Zones
The action Associate Time Zone is available on the Locations and Assets application to associate or remove a time zone on the current record or a selected set of locations or assets. There is no Time Zone field displayed on the Locations and Assets application, but it could be easily configured.
The reason why associating a time zone could be important if your organization works across multiple time zones is because there are processes which calculate date/time fields like generating a work order from a Preventive Maintenance record where if no time zone were set then the server time zone is applied.
A Time Zone Rule will need to be defined to say how to derive a time when generating a work order. For example, a Time Zone Rule may use the asset’s time zone and if not specified use the time zone on the location. The Time Zone Rules application will be found in the Administration module.
You can define a time zone for a SiteA structural element of a Maximo database that is used for data separation. More in the Organizations application and for a Route. The Time Zone Rule’s Process Rule can use these time zones if there is no time zone association on the location or asset.
Alternatively, you can define the time zone to use on the PM record using the Associate Time Zone action.
I hope you enjoyed this podcast episode and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode when we will review Asset Moves and Asset Swaps.
The music is called Busy City from the group called TrackTribe, please check them out on TrackTribe.Com, all one word.
Until another time, goodbye.
Links
See Asset and Location Select Value in New Service Requests
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