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 Maintenance Planning and we will be discussing People and Person Groups.
The People application is a part of core data that you will setup in a Maximo system. People can also belong to one or more teams, a Person Group.
People
A Person is anyone that you reference in Maximo. They may be a Maximo user, someone who logs in, and/or they may be a person who is assigned and performs work, and for this you will need a labor record. In Maximo 7.6 the Person record is created first before a Maximo user. We will find when we look at the Labor application that you can create a Labor and their Person records at the same time. However, in Maximo Application Suite the person and user are created at the same time at the suite administration level, and these are synchronised to Maximo Manage. Therefore, for users start at suite administration, for new people who are not Maximo users you can use the People application.
The People application will be found in the Administration module and Resources sub-module. A person record has a simple status of active or inactive. An inactive person will no longer be able to be added to other records in Maximo and making them inactive will also inactivate their labor and user records. However, you might find that for some people making them inactive will require them to be disassociated with any locationsA physical place where assets exist and where work can be performed. More and assets, and they need to be unassigned from any open work orders.
A person can be made active again, but you will need to change status on any labor or user record separately, you will receive a warning that these other records exist.
The most important fields in the People application are first name, last name and the display name will be generated according to a setting found in the People section of System Settings 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. The display name will be shown throughout Maximo, making it easy to change names without changing the identifier of the person, labor, or user.
Other important fields are Primary Phone and Primary E-mail, multiple phones and emails can be recorded for each person. Supervisor and Person’s SiteA structural element of a Maximo database that is used for data separation. More would often be entered on many Maximo systems and then other fields are dependent on which feature/functions are being used, for example Primary Calendar/Shift if there are associated labor records and you will record a person’s availability in Maximo, Workflow or Procurement Card details if they are being used.
There are several fields found in the People application where today you need to consider the record from a privacy perspective, for example address fields, date of birth, hire date or termination date, the sort of fields that you might only expect in an HR system.
While we are considering privacy, some care should be taken regarding the identifier of a Person record. It is normal to align the Labor and User records to the Person record and Maximo does not allow you to change identifiers which are key fields in the database. Therefore, from a privacy perspective you should consider which of JEFFERYA or AJE007 or 1007 are the most appropriate identifiers. JEFFERYA is too recognisable if Andrew Jeffery (that’s me) is no longer associated with your organization. 1007 wouldn’t help identify you on records where the display name was not shown. AJE007 might be a reasonable compromise. It is possible to easily configure a hover-over dialog where only the Person Identifier is displayed instead of also the Display Name, this would allow you to use a numeric key for a person, like 1007, and then you hover over the field to see who it is.
In Europe we have the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduced on 25th May 2018 and one of the rights granted to data subjects is the right of erasure (to be forgotten). You cannot remove identifiers in Maximo and so you shouldn’t be able to identify a person from either of their three identifiers, person, labor, or user. I’ll include in the transcript two links I wrote a few years ago, one a summary of GDPR, the other what GDPR means to Maximo.
There are actions found in the People application which are normally only granted to administrators. Manage Personal Information allows you to define how to configure personal data, make a field null, randomise the data, or to delete data rows for example phone numbers, email addresses or SMS addresses. Then you enable this on each person in turn using the action Delete Person Data.
There are several actions in the People application which I will briefly describe here, some I will cover in more depth in separate pages.
- View Related Assets and Locations action allows you to view (but not change) the asset and location records where the person has been set as a User or Custodian.
- Modify Person Availability action is used with a calendar and shift to define the periods of time when a person is not available, due to holiday, sickness, or other non-working event, or to make a person available for a period which is not considered their normal working periods, an additional work event.
- Associate Commodities action is used to associate one or more commodity groups or codes to the person. For example, if the person is a buyer, then these are the commodity groups/codes that they are responsible for buying. If these are Service Groups/Services, then it might be those services which the person provides.
- Add/Modify Commodity Codes action is used to set up Commodity Groups and their codes.
- Add/Update Image action allows you to add a single photo to the person record.
Finally, there are actions to allow you to Manage Library, Manage Folders and Associate Folders to the person record, a feature associated with Linked Documents which will appear in many Maximo applications.
Person Groups
The Person Groups application is used for creating teams and will also be found in the Administration module and Resources sub-module. Most Person Groups are defined very simply with a code, description and a set of people that make up the team, these are known as the primary persons. There is no status on this application. However, only people with a status of ACTIVE can be added to a person group, and you cannot change the status of a person to INACTIVE if they are a member of a person group.
The application does a little more than just define the team members and originally it was set up as a part of Workflow which is where several of the other fields fit including the Alternates table window. It is a System level object, and when it was introduced, it replaced Labor Groups which was a Site level object. As you enter the team members the sequence number is important because it determines the order in which people are searched during workflow assignments and the sending of email communications.
The Use For Organization and Use For Site determines whether a person is at the Group level (both fields are null), Organization level or Site level. In a person group the person can only exist at the one level. If you wish to create a site level team, then add people to the team and set their Use For Site to the site where the team is based. Similarly for an organization level team all people should have their Use For Organization set to the organization. These two fields are read-only after a record is saved.
When adding the set of people associated with the person group you can mark a person as the group default, organization default or site default. Only one person can be the site default for a site, only one person can be the organization default for an organization and only one person can be the group default. These are used with sending an email communication to the members of the team when using a Role based on a Person Group and with the Broadcast field disabled. The functionality also considers the availability of the person, if they are not available then another person will receive the communication. In the transcript I’ll include a link where this was tested.
The Alternates table window is only used in Workflow search rules to determine who to route to when none of the primary persons is available according to their calendar and shift, it will start searching for alternates based on the primary person with the lowest sequence number. It will search for alternates based on sequence and whether the alternate is also available. If no primary or alternate is available then if the workflow object is site based the site default will be used, otherwise the group default is used. If the workflow object is organization based the organization default will be used, otherwise the group default is used.
Finally, a Person Group may be a set of people that can be used across a set of crews that are grouped together as a Crew Work Group. For example, there are a set of six crews that work from a particular depot and the crews are manned from the set of people defined in the person group.
A Crew Work Group is a Person Group where the Crew Work Group flag is checked. There is an action available in the List tab called Make Available to Crews, which will check the Crew Work Group field on a selected set of Person Groups.
I hope you enjoyed this podcast episode and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode when we will be discussing Craft, Labor and Qualifications.
The music is called Drag Race from the group called TrackTribe, please check them out on TrackTribe.Com, all one word.
Until another time, goodbye.
Related Links
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – http://maximosecrets.com/2018/04/18/general-data-protection-regulationgdpr/
Maximo and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – http://maximosecrets.com/2018/05/03/maximo-and-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/
Ticket Communications (2) – http://maximosecrets.com/2021/12/02/ticket-communications-2/
Person Groups – http://maximosecrets.com/2017/01/18/person-groups/
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