Last Updated on December 28, 2022 by maximosecrets

The music is called Drag Race 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 and welcome to the first episode in the series on Maintenance Planning. I’m Andrew Jeffery and today we’ll be discussing People and Person Groups.

The Maintenance Planning series will take us through several Maximo modules, Resources in the Administration module, Planning including the Safety module, and Preventive Maintenance. Dynamic Job Plans will be covered as part of Work Management.

Please subscribe to this channel so that you don’t miss out on new episodes as they are published. 

Learning Objectives

Today, we’ll be looking at both the People and the Person Groups applications, both will be found in the Resources sub-module a part of the Administration module. 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.

There are some differences between Maximo Application Suite and Maximo 7.6, and we will discuss this at the end of the video.

So, let’s get started.

People

The People application is used to define any person that you reference in Maximo. A Person record is required when you create either a Labor record, a person who is assigned work and records hours, or a Maximo user. People and Users are defined at the System level in Maximo. However, a Labor record is defined at the Organization level, a person who works across multiple organizations will require multiple Labor records. The reason for this is because the recording of time is a financial record that requires a base currency which is defined at the organization level and an organization is often the level at which there are interfaces to financial systems.

The unique identifier for a person (PERSONID) is separate from a user identifier (USERID), they do not need to be the same, but they are often aligned for simplicity. The same applies to the identifier of a Labor record (LABORCODE) it does not need to be aligned to the person identifier, but it often is. The username (LOGINID) which is the name used to log in to Maximo is a separate identifier which is typically not aligned to person, labor or user.

In Maximo you will often see a Display Name displayed alongside the identifier for the person. The display name can be generated from the First Name and Last Name, how these two values are combined is controlled from the People section of the System Settings action 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.

Each Person would normally have an email address and phone number. Multiple emails and phone numbers are possible through the Show/Manage Values button, one of which must be marked as Primary, and this is the one you see in the person record. If you add multiple records of either type then the Primary Phone and Primary E-mail fields will become read-only, you can see that this is the case for the Primary E-mail field in the screenshot on the right.

Many of the other fields which you see in the application like the address fields and those in the Employee Information section are historical and would be typically found in a Human Resource (HR) system rather than in Maximo. Before you use these fields, you should consider any local privacy regulations. In Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduced on 25th May 2018 would require you to blank these fields or anonymise the data if a person left your employment.

As is common to many systems based on relational databases the fields which make up the unique identifier cannot be updated after the data has been saved to the database. Therefore, if you are subject to privacy regulations you should review what values you use for the three identifiers PERSONID, LABORCODE, and USERID as you will not be able to change the values and you may be required to ensure that the person cannot be recognised if they choose to be forgotten after they had left your employment. I’ll include in the video description and the transcript some links to articles I wrote a few years back, about GDPR.

There is an action called Manage People Data which is used to define the personal information that you wish to clean-up if a person’s information is no longer required in the system, or they choose for it to be removed. The action opens the Manage Personal Information dialog where you can decide the Removal Type, NULL, RANDOMIZE or DELROW (Delete Row). You can apply the removal of data on the Person, User, and Labor objects as well as the Phone, Email and SMS objects. For example, making null the fields like the Birth Date or Hire Date on the Person record, deleting any phone, email, or SMS records, or exchanging the letters of the person’s last name with random characters and numbers. The Delete Person Data action is used for each person in turn where you wish to remove private data, applying the settings made in the Manage Personal Information dialog.

These two actions are normally only applied to the Maximo Administrator. There are three signature options which need to be set, Manage People Data, Delete Person Data, and Delete Person Data Button.

People Actions

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.

When you attempt to make a person inactive several validations occur that might result in one or more error messages. You cannot make a person inactive if they exist on a location or asset as a user or custodian, if they are referenced as a workflow delegate, or a supervisor of other people. You will need to ensure the person is not referenced on a Person Group, as a Ship To or Bill To Contact, or on a Communication Template. A person cannot be made inactive if they are an Owner of a Service Request or other type of ticket, or if they are currently logged on. You’ll also find that you will not be able to make a person inactive if they have a labor record that is referenced on an open work assignment or on a work plan.

If an inactive person is made active again, you will need to manually change status on any labor or user record, the status is not rolled through to these records, you will be warned if these records exist. There is an action View History that shows the status history of the Person record.

There are actions that allow you to add an image to a person, other images or documents can be attached using the standard methods. While a person can be associated with multiple assets or locationsA physical place where assets exist and where work can be performed. More, for example the IT assets that they have been provided or the maintenance assets/locations they are responsible for, you cannot make these associations from the People application only view the results through the View Related Assets and Locations action.

If a person is a buyer, then you can associate them with one or more commodity groups/codes through the action Associate Commodities. The Add/Modify Commodity Codes actions will also be found in the People application.

Of all the actions which will be found it is the Modify Person Availability which is likely to be used the most and this action can operate from the List tab against multiple people. People will need to be assigned a Calendar and Shift for this action to work. You are adding or amending records that change the work period dates defined by the calendar and shift, whether indicating time when the person will be away from work, for example holiday or sickness, or when they will be available for additional work hours, after their shift or on days that are normally considered non-working days. This is typically only used if the person is assigned work through a labor record or they are part of a crew, but it can also be used for people who work on a service desk to indicate their availability. There will be a video on calendars and availability in a few weeks’ time.

A user may be able to change their own data through their Profile – Default information, Personal information and Set or modify e-signature key. In Maximo Application Suite password information is changed at the suite level. There is no longer a Password Information dialog in the Profile, but the Manage Profile button will allow you to Change password, User information, and Language and region, across all applications in the suite.

As we progress through other videos, we may occasionally come back to various fields on the Person record as there are fields that provide functionality to other Maximo applications.

Person Groups

The Person Groups application is supported by another System level object and will also be found in the Resources sub module of the Administration module. A Person Group is a team of people and in many cases a person group is simply a code, a description and a list of people that make up the team.

There is no status field on a Person Group. To add people into the Person Group they need to be made ACTIVE, and you cannot make a person INACTIVE if they belong to a Person Group. A person can belong to multiple person groups.

When adding a team, you need to consider whether a person is in the team at the site level, or organization level by adding one or other of the Use For SiteA structural element of a Maximo database that is used for data separation. More or Use For Organization fields. If both fields are left blank, then the person is considered a system wide team member. These two fields will become read-only after a record in the People table window has been saved. If your organisation has multiple sites and organizations, then you might find it simpler to have Person Groups where the Use For Site or Use For Organization value is the same for each person in the team.

The flexibility to reference multiple Use For Site or Use For Organization values across team members, is used where there is a centralised function working in multiple territories from multiple locations, for example a service desk.

The fields Group Default , Organization Default , and Site Default are used to indicate who will be the default person for the site, organization, or the whole person group. You will not be able to access the Site Default field unless the Use For Site is set, similarly for the Organization Default and the Use For Organization field. These fields are used with Communication Templates and Workflow and on the ticket-based applications, for example to determine who to route a Service Request to. The functionality first considers the calendar/shift of the person in the team. If nobody is found who is on-shift, then a Site Default is used, if no Site Default is found the Organization Default is used, and if no Organization Default is found the Group Default will be used.

The Alternates For table window is used with Workflow and when no person in the top table window is available according to their calendar and shift. Maximo will search for alternates based on the person in the top table window with the lowest sequence number. If all alternates are unavailable Maximo moves on to the person with the next lowest sequence number and checks the availability of their alternates. Which of the Site Default, Organization Default, or Group Default persons is used if no alternates are available is dependent on whether the workflow object is based at site, organization, or system level.

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.

Person Groups are also used with crews. A Crew Work Group is a Person Group where the Crew Work Group attribute is set. This field can be set for multiple person groups by using the List tab action Make Available to Crews. The team members of the person group are used to fill the positions of crews that belong to a crew work group. For example, five crews work from a depot and each crew belongs to the same crew work group, a person group. When assigning labor to a crew, making a Crew – Labor Assignment, then you select from the pool of labor whose person record exists in the Person Group referenced as the Crew Work Group.

Differences between MAS and Maximo 7.6

In Maximo Application Suite (MAS) users are defined at the suite level. There is a Suite Administration application, the cog symbol in the header menu, and one of the options is Users. This presents a list of all the users and an option Create user.

The page that opens is split into three areas Identity, Entitlement and Application Access. In the Identity section you enter a Display Name, User ID, Primary email, and a Password. You can choose whether to make the username the same as the User ID or enter a different one, which is the Custom option . Additional Information includes Given Name, Surname, Title, and you can enter additional email addresses and phone numbers. Address fields for Street Address, City, State, Postal code and Country, and the Locale and Time Zone complete the Identity section.

After you submit and Maximo Application Suite returns you to the View User page, you might notice a message saying ‘Synching with applications’, this is not creating the Person and User records in Maximo Manage, you need to first fill-out the entitlements.

You will need to decide for each user whether they are part of a Concurrent pool or an Authorised user, a named user. Then you set the Application Entitlement and Administration Entitlement, and this calculates the AppPoints for the user. If you save the updates, you will receive a message “User updated – An update request was submitted for the user jws. The system is synchronizing the changes.”. In this message jws was the User ID.

In Maximo Manage, the Person in the People application (PERSONID) is the User ID in capital letters. No Labor record is created. In the Users application the Maximo user (USERID) is set the same as PERSONID and the User Name (LOGINID) is the same as you entered for the User ID or the Custom value if you chose that radio button. Initially a new user will be given access to the EVERYONE and DEFLTREG security groups, so once the user has been created you would go into Maximo Manage and add them to the Security Groups based on their roles. Note, in Maximo Application Suite the PERSONID and USERID are aligned, this does not have to be the case in Maximo 7.6 and so if they are different in Maximo today then you should verify how this is handled during the upgrade.

Updating the user from the suite’s Administration app updates the corresponding fields in the Person record. Removing the user from the suite sets the user record in Maximo Manage to INACTIVE, while the Person record remains at ACTIVE state. You would have learnt earlier in this video that there are several validations that are performed when trying to set the status of a person to INACTIVE.

Once you have removed a user from the suite then you can’t recall that person again. But if you create a new user with the same user id as before, then in the tests I performed it picked up the same Person and User record in Maximo Manage and set the status of the user to ACTIVE.

The third element of the user record is Application Access, and this was defaulted to Manage with Health on my system. The Access rights are either ‘Set in Manage’ or ‘No access’.

If your system had multiple suite applications installed, then access to the application is based on entitlement levels. For example, for Maximo Monitor access you would need to change from ‘None’ to ‘Limited’. For Maximo Health and Maximo Safety the entitlement level would be ‘Base’ and for Maximo Predict and Maximo Visual Inspection it would be ‘Premium’. You can have access to an application as an Administrator rather than a User if this is granted. If you have Premium entitlement for Maximo Manage it does not mean you automatically have ‘User’ access to another suite application, it may have been set to ‘No Access’ by the suite administrator.

When creating a user in the suite you might just come across the error message ‘AIUCO1017E: There are not enough AppPoints to support the entitlement change for user aje’. Incidentally, these suite-based messages will not be found in the MAXMESSAGES object.

Thank you for watching

I hope you have enjoyed this video on People and Person Groups and found it useful and thank you for watching. We would like to see you back in our next episode when we will be reviewing three applications Crafts, Labor and Qualifications. Don’t forget to hit the Subscribe button, and if you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up.

It was a new music track for this series on Maintenance Planning, it is called Drag Race from the group called TrackTribe, do check them out on track tribe .com, all one word (tracktribe.com). 

Until another time, Goodbye.