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

Title

Good afternoon and welcome to the fourteenth and last episode in the series on Asset Management. I’m Andrew Jeffery and today we’ll be discussing Asset Relationships.

There are other aspects of Asset Management I haven’t yet covered, financial aspects like Asset Depreciation, or broader subjects like Linear Assets, and Repair Facilities. I haven’t forgotten about these they will be covered in later series. The next series will be on Maintenance Planning.

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Learning Objectives

Asset Relationships is a subject that is fundamental to linear assets, however, they can be used with non-linear assets. They allow you to create any sort of relationship between an asset and another asset or location. Relationships can also be used between Configuration Items, but we will not be discussing this today.

We’ll start by looking at the Relationships application before we turn our attention to the Relationships tab in the Assets application.

So, let’s get started.

Relationships

The Relationships application will be found in both the Assets module and the IT Infrastructure module. The relationship is a user defined noun that describe the type of relationship in our example on the right it is CONNECTS – Source is connected to the Target .

In a relationship there is always a source and a target. Normally the source is the current asset, and the target is another asset or a location. The current asset can also be a target, we’ll talk about this more in the next section.

The Type field has two settings UNIDIRECTIONAL or BIDIRECTIONAL. For example, A connects B is bidirectional because it can be read in the opposite direction as B connects A. There is a hidden attribute COMPRELATION – Complementary Relationship, which can be used to pair two UNIDIRECTIONAL relationships, if you add the complementary relationship on one of the relationships records it will be added to the other record.

The Classification field serves little purpose for Assets, there is no Specification, and the classification is not copied when you create a relationship on an asset. If you had a lot of relationships used by different parties in your organization, then you could use this like a Type field, or you could use it to describe the purpose of a set of relationships. The Classification field does appear in the Advanced Search, so I would use it if you had a need to group relationships together for a reason.

The Use With field has two options ASSET and CI. If you are not using Configuration Items, then I would change the default value to ASSET in Database Configuration.

The Allow Override field is used if you are going to create Asset Relationship Rules. It turns an error when a rule is broken to a warning which allows you to choose whether to override the rule or not.

There are two other fields that are used with Linear Assets. The LINEAR field indicates whether the relationship can be used with a linear asset and is useful for separating relationships used for linear from those not used with linear. If you are going to use Linear Assets, then unhide it so that it can be set. The ‘Is Reference Point’ field , attribute ISLINEARREF, when set will create a linear feature when the relationship is used. A reference point is a point along the linear asset from which other things can be measured, for example a bridge where one road crosses over another, the relationship would be used as a reference point.

At the bottom of the Relationships application is a table window where you can define Asset Relationship Rules . There are no relationships in a MAXDEMO database with relationship rules to see how this works. They perform validations when the relationship is used. In the simplest case you specify a source classification and a target classification, and this restricts when the relationship can be used. For a relationship between two assets, the source asset must have the source classification and the target asset must have the target classification.

You can extend this down to validation rules for one or more attributes of the classifications. Within one rule group you can define whether the attribute condition has a logical OR or AND with another attribute condition. For example, a type of pole mounted transformer may only be connected to an electric line asset if the source attribute has a certain voltage (11kv). The transformer is used to convert voltage down to 400 volts so that it can be used to power homes.

You can also have multiple rule groups where there is a logical OR between each group, only one group’s set of conditions need to be satisfied for the overall validation to be successful when setting up a relationship between two assets. When the validation rules are defined and used on an asset you may receive an error message like “BMXAA8016E – The rule validation for the relationship failed. Rule conditions must be met for the relationship to be established.” If the Allow Override attribute is set, then instead of an error you will receive a warning with Yes/No buttons, for example, “BMXAA8021W – The relationship rule validations failed. Do you want to override the validation rules for this relationship and allow the relationship to be created?”

This functionality is powerful and takes a while to work out exactly how the rules are working. You do need to start with a genuine reason for creating a relationship between multiple assets, then when you know the reason, the rules are helping you to make sure that only assets with the right classifications can be related together.

Relationships are defined at the System level.

Asset Relationships

We are in the Assets application and the Relationships tab . For asset 11220 an Electric Control Panel – HVAC System, we have created a relationship using a new relationship called ELECSUPPLY – Supplies Electricity. The Source Asset is the current asset 11220, and the target asset is 11200 the HVAC System. A relationship is used between a source and a target, the source or target may be either an asset or location, but the current asset must be referenced as either a source asset or a target asset.

Using Asset Relationships to map electric cable connections is a real-world use, although I think we would be dealing with assets that would be lower in the hierarchy. Before I did this test, I had added the classification ELECTRICAL to asset 11220. The classification of asset 11200 is HVAC.

When you look at the Relationships table window there are fields that are used with Linear Assets, the four fields Source Start/End Measure and Target Start/End Measure. If you were using Relationships for non-linear purposes, you would probably want to find a way of hiding all the linear fields, there are a lot in the lower half of the details area, two lots of linear segment details, one for the source and the other for the target. If you had a mix of linear and non-linear then you might find that your users split into these two camps, and you might hide the linear fields based on whether your users worked on linear assets or not. I think you could find a way through configuration of conditionally exposing these fields depending on whether the source asset or target asset was marked as a linear asset.

In the test I performed for the screenshot the relationship passed an Asset Relationship Rule that I had entered between a Source Classification of ELECTRICAL and a Target Classification of HVAC. If I had chosen a Target Asset of 11430 a Centrifugal Pump, I would have received the error message ‘The rule validation failed. You must ensure that the source classification and the target classification match the source and target classification of the asset. (BMXAA8014).’

The asset relationship is added to an object ASSETLOCRELATION which is also defined at the System level. It has one ORGID and SITEID field implying that you cannot create a relationship across sites for assets. If you really wanted to do this, you would have to be using Configuration Items as CIs are defined at the System level.

You might have spotted by now that you can use a Source Location or Target Location . When you are using either the source or target, one of the fields Asset or Location must be used, but you cannot create a relationship between locationsA physical place where assets exist and where work can be performed. More because the current asset must either be the Source Asset or the Target Asset. The Sequence field provides a logical order for multiple asset relationships. The ‘Use as Reference’ field is only used with Linear Assets.

Above the table window you can choose to view asset relationships using the current asset record as the Source asset, Target asset, or the View All option will find all asset relationships that reference the current asset.

The View Asset Relationship History action shows two table windows, the top one is where the current asset is the source asset, so it is showing the Target Assets. The lower table window is where the current asset is the target asset in a relationship, so it is showing the Source Assets in those relationships. Again, these table windows have a lot of fields associated with Linear Assets.

Thank you for watching

I hope you have enjoyed this video on Asset Relationships and found it useful and thank you for watching. We would like to see you back in our next episode when we will start the series on Maintenance Planning with People and Person Groups.

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Until another time, Goodbye.