The music is called Busy City from a group called TrackTribe.

Hello, and welcome back to Maximo Bite Size. A series of videos on the functional aspects of Maximo Manage. 

Title

Good morning, it’s Andrew Jeffery here, and this is the first episode in the series on Asset Management and today I’ll be introducing you to Location TypesThere are eight location types of which the most common one is an Operating Location. More and Location SystemsA Location System is a set of operating locations joined together to form a hierarchy or a network. More.

Learning Objectives

We’ll be discussing the different location types in Maximo, you will probably be using OPERATING but there are a few others. It is Operating LocationsA location with a location type of OPERATING. More that can be added to Location Systems, and we have two types, Hierarchical and Network to explain. A location can belong to multiple systems, not just the primary system, and we’ll give some examples of why you might use multiple systems. As this is the first episode in the Asset Management series I wanted to emphasise that these are SITE based objects and I’ll be reviewing the significance of this. And finally, we’ll finish off with discussing the similarities and differences between Locations and Assets. So let’s get started.

Location Types

Location Types define the purpose of the location. We are in the Locations application and when you are adding a new location, you’ll find that there is a mandatory field called Type just below the Location identifier. The Select Value in this field shows the set of Location Types to choose from, as shown on the right, and in most cases you’ll be selecting OPERATING. This is a location where you will find equipment or assets that will be operating, unless they are down, or idle, or on standby of course.

The VENDOR, SALVAGE and REPAIR types are also locationsA physical place where assets exist and where work can be performed. More where assets can be found but they would not be operating. VENDOR and REPAIR are used for external and 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, and they act like storerooms and can maintain a balance of an item. When an item is moved between storerooms these locations can be used to indicate who is responsible for the transferred items before they reach their destination storeroom. This is why they are sometimes referred to as “Transit StoreroomsA location that temporarily holds inventory that is “in transit”. More”. Another use for LABOR type locations is to register the stock held by a field service engineer who is working out of their van. 

Every Maximo SiteA structural element of a Maximo database that is used for data separation. More must have one and only one location of type HOLDING. This is used for the receipt of goods that are waiting to be inspected or serialized. Often we call the HOLDING location – RECEIVING, and it is in the Receiving application, a part of the Purchasing module, where you will come across this.

There is one other location type called STOREROOM, which is used in Inventory, but you need to be in the Storerooms application to create these records.

Location Systems

It is only locations of type OPERATING that can be added to a Location System and a location must exist before you can use the Manage Systems action to define your systems, as shown on the right. The first system you enter will be hierarchical and will be marked as the Primary System. So, the first location you create in a Maximo Site should be the location that you wish to exist at the very top of the primary hierarchy.

It may seem obvious but in a Hierarchical System each location can only have one parent, except of course the location at the top of the hierarchy, which doesn’t have a parent. In a Network System, however, a location can have multiple parents. An example might be the towers or pylons that you see in the countryside. These often have arms on each side and each side is supporting an electric circuit, each tower has two parent locations, one for each circuit. When an outage is required on a circuit you can identify all the locations which belong to it. Conveyors in a warehouse, or mineral plant which carry items or rock between other areas can also be represented in a network system.

An operating location can belong to multiple systems, either hierarchical or network. A location system is a means of grouping locations that share a common purpose. The Primary System is often geographic based, and supports a drilldown, it is what is needed to help find the assets that exist at those operating locations. The most frequent use of secondary systems is to group locations according to the system they support, for example heating and ventilation, water, power, or drainage. But systems can also be used for outage management, reporting purposes, for example joining locations that belong to a common area or region, and sometimes location systems are used to help with data security.

Locations or Assets?

I’m often asked when do I use a Location and when do I use an Asset, and I’ll try to answer that question on this slide.

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. The location for 4th floor lighting in a building may be all that is needed to perform maintenance and control costs, without the need to create assets for each lamp. Some Maximo clients call these locations, functional positions. 

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 like Assets are Site level objects. You might 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 and Assets cannot be related to other locations that exist in different sites, contain assets from other sites, or be referenced on work orders for other sites. A work order for the BEDFORD site can only reference work to be performed on locations and assets on the BEDFORD site, there is data separation between the work performed on one site from the work performed on other sites. 

I like to think of Sites as a series of islands which may be grouped together represented by an OrganizationA structural element of a Maximo database which is used for data sharing and is often aligned to a legal entity of an organisation. More. There are no tunnels or bridges between these islands, you cannot link locations and assets from one site to the locations and assets in other sites. Work is performed on each island on its locations and assets. You cannot create a work package of work orders that are on different islands, the work package’s site must be the same site as all other work orders in its hierarchy.

You can use a Maximo Site to represent multiple physical sites all sharing the same 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. If boundary changes occur frequently then my preference is to use a secondary system.

Locations and Assets both support hierarchies, although an asset can only belong to one hierarchy. Work order history is tracked against both the asset and the location. An asset can be moved between locations and its history goes with it. Locations and Assets have a lot in common, they can both have a Classification and a set of attributes associated with the classification which we call a Specification. They can both have a Service Address and be represented on a map when there are geographical coordinates. They both support meters and failure reporting, and can have safety hazards defined against them. They can both be associated with Work Zones, Services, Users and Custodians, and Time Zones, and they can both be marked as Rotating. Don’t worry if a lot of this terminology is new to you as they will all be subjects of future episodes in this Asset Management series. 

In Maximo, assets have a serial number, and a tag number, and can be used for recording downtime, locations cannot. Assets can be generated or updated from an Asset Template, and they can be moved into a storeroom where there will be an inventory balance. When it is time for an asset to be repaired, the asset at an operating location can be swapped with a storeroom asset. And, going back to the island analogy, an asset can be moved to a different island, another site, and if the asset physically moves, as in a boat that sails between the islands, then it can be repaired at a port on another island, in Maximo terminology, this is a Repair LocationA location with a location type of REPAIR. More. Maximo also supports with assets, the infrastructure of roads, rails and pipes on the island, using the Linear Assets functionality.

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.

Thank you for watching

I hope you have enjoyed this episode on Location Types and Location Systems and thank you for listening. We would like to see you back in our next episode when we will be looking at Service Addresses. Don’t forget to hit the Subscribe button, and if you found this video useful then please hit the thumbs up button. 

Until another time, Goodbye.