Technician is a Maximo Mobile application which will also be found on the desktop in the Work Orders module and Role Based Applications. There may be some differences between the mobile application and the role-based application, and I aim to uncover those differences. Maximo Mobile aims to be an offline solution, the Role Based Application performs the same functions, but only works online from a browser.

This is the fourth article on the Role-Based Application – Technician and the screenshots have been taken with an iPad in landscape mode. The first article was focused on the creation of a new work order and its immediate review. The second and third articles went into more depth in the review and changes that can be made to existing work orders. In this fourth article we will continue the review of the work order, we will start with specifications and move onto tasks. 

The environment I am using is MAS 8.11.0, Maximo Manage 8.7.3 and Maximo Mobile 8.11.0.

Specifications

I’ve created a new work order for the next few tests, work order 1317 with the uninspiring description of Work Order Specification Test. I’ve chosen a new asset 12223, a Centrifugal Pump, but not a rotating item, which I have placed in the Boiler Room location.

If you navigate to the Review Work Order screen you can see the reference to the work order classification CNTRFGL, it ought to provide the full path PUMP \ CNTRFGL and the Classification Path description – Centrifugal Pump. CNTRFGL as a classification noun can be used with other types of assets, for example FAN, also just providing the classification codes would not work very well for a numeric coding structure.  I’ve raised this with IBM Support.

Notice the Inspection button (4^th button) and the Task button shows one task. We’ll be reviewing these in the next few sections of this article. 

At the bottom of the Review Work Order screen, below Attachments and Follow-up Work, a Specifications section is available. This is displayed if there are attributes in the Work Order Specification.

The Work Order Specification is displayed, unfortunately this is currently just read-only. I’ve raised an IBM Idea, to suggest that it should be updateable. The Specifications are updateable in some other role-based applications, so perhaps it is already planned, but registering the idea does no harm.

Notice that all attribute types ALN, Numeric or Date (Vibration Analysis Date) are displayed in one column with the unit of measure displayed in parenthesis.

Set GPS Location

The third button in the Details section of the Review Work Order screen will allow you to set the GPS LocationA physical place where assets exist and where work can be performed. More on the current work order. A green background message – Device location saved – is displayed and a map button will also be activated on the right underneath where the Schedule Dates and Duration would be shown.

If you click the Map button the Map View is displayed, showing the position of the work order, it will be at the same point as the green circle identifying your current GPS location.

After activating, if you review the work order in the Work Order Tracking application, you’ll find that the Latitude/Longitude fields have been set, and this would show the position of the work order on the Map tab if maps have been set-up on your Maximo environment.

The Latitude/Longitude is often associated with a Service AddressA Service Address is a postal address and/or a record that positions a point on a map. More and if an address is shown along with the Map button, then bear in mind that if you use the Set GPS Location button it will overwrite the Latitude/Longitude on the work order. It does not change the Service Address details or the Latitude/Longitude on the Service Address, only those two fields on the work order. It should be used to show an accurate position of where the work took place.

Conduct an Inspection

Inspections can be conducted on a work order, a task, and on a record in the Multiple Assets, Locations and CIs table, which we saw in the Technician (3) article. The 4^th button in the Details section from a couple of screenshots back was used and this launches the Inspection application and the Inspection Results record.

You use the blue Start button and then start answering the questions of the inspection.

As you answer the questions the number of required inspections answered increments and can be seen at the top. A required inspection question or action is indicated by a blue dot. At this point I stopped and returned to the Technician role-based application and even re-fetched the work order record, but there was no indication that the inspection had been started.

The inspection is Completed when all mandatory questions have been answered. There is a Summary page which is shown.

When returning to the Technician role-based application and re-fetching the work order record, there was still no indication of the state of the inspection. I’ve raised an IBM Idea to give an indication of the Inspection Status which could be by colour coding the icon.

Tasks

I’m going to split my review of tasks into two, with the second part focusing on the support for flow control.

Work Order 1318 has just the one task which I have packed with data to see what appears in the application. At the top is the Task number (not the sequence) followed by the task description with the task status below.

Below this is the asset and location which can be different from the primary asset and location, the ones referenced on the parent work order. The chevron button to the right of the location, HWSTOCK, will take the user to the Asset Manager application where you can edit the asset, in this case 1947 – Hard Drive.

What you might have noticed already is that tasks look to be mainly non-updateable, and there is no ability to create a task. You couldn’t currently use the Technician application to allow your senior technicians to create the tasks as they perform the work so that you can later use this to create or update a Job Plan. Sometimes additional tasks are created to capture tasks that need to be performed after completion, for example the update of documents or drawings. I’ve created an IBM Idea to allow tasks to be created and updated, particularly the description and long description.

The task’s long description is shown without rich text formatting below the asset and location fields. There is a button on the right which shows the long description, this time with rich text formatting, but this is also read-only and cannot be modified.

The status button below the task number and description allows you to select the new task status. The statuses that you can move to are dependent on the current task status. There is no status memo field. In many cases, the task status is just moved to Completed (COMP) and there is a big blue button for this, which will be quicker to use than selecting the status to move to.

The Conduct a Measurement section is enabled when the task contains a Condition Monitoring Measurement Point, which can be for a meter of type Gauge or Characteristic. The Date and Time defaults to date/time now but can be changed with lookups. In the case of this meter, which is of characteristic type, the associated domain provides a lookup and I selected 11/16.

When the measurement value has been entered or selected the button at the top turns to blue which saves the measurement or observation.

Note. In Work Order Tracking you cannot enter a meter reading for a continuous meter against the task’s asset or location, not without launching the Activities and Tasks application. It is also not possible to enter multiple meter readings for the same asset or location on a single task. If you want to do either of these things, then the use of the Multiple Assets, Locations and CIs table should be considered.

After save, the values cannot be changed.

A task can also launch an Inspection and a task can show one or more attachments. In the Work Order Tracking application, I had provided a document link to the Maximo Secrets website and the link displayed did launch the site.

When the last task has been completed the blue Done button appears and this will take you through to the Report Work screen.

Incidentally, the task had a classification with a specification value, owner, sequence number, inspector, scheduled start, scheduled finish, and duration, and none of these fields were displayed.

Start/Stop Travel

I was just about to launch into a section called Tasks with Flow Control, and when I returned to work order 1285 created in an earlier Technician article, which had a set of tasks, I noticed the blue Start Travel button, and this has led me to discuss the Start/Stop Timers first.

Work order 1285 was to replace a fridge/freezer at my home in North Devon, which after 23 years had decided to die on us, just before Christmas. When I took this screenshot, I was nearly 200 miles away near London. To get the Start Travel button the work order must be Approved (APPR) or later state, you will need a Service Address on the work order that provides the Latitude/Longitude, or just the Latitude/Longitude, the device with GPS needs to be some distance away from this point.

There are a couple of system properties that control this:

• mxe.mobile.travel.prompt – Users can track travel time when the value in mxe.mobile.travel.radius is matched or exceeded. The Maximo Default is 0, and it needs to be set to 1 to track travel time.
• mxe.mobile.travel.radius – The radius, from the GPS location of the user to the WO, over which travel time can be tracked. The Maximo Default is 1, and the unit is miles, or kilometres, depending on your region setting.

I can confirm that the radius is as the bird flies and not the distance of 1 mile driving distance. I’m also not convinced that it depends on your region settings, because I tried changing the region on the iPad, and also the locale of the user in Maximo and I couldn’t get it to work for 1km radius, but this really shouldn’t matter. So, if the distance to travel is more than a mile away the Start Travel button will show if the first System Property is set to 1.

However, there will be cases where a client wants to book travel time in an airport, hospital, chemical plant, or refinery where distances are shorter, less than one mile, but the technician may be on foot and where travel can take longer than 15 minutes. Added-up over the course of a day, this travel can be easily more than 1 hour or >15% of the working day. However, the System Property is expecting only an integer, so you couldn’t set it to say 0.2. As a Scheduler I would want to progressively reduce the amount of overall travel time, perhaps by grouping work orders at the same locality, so being more granular than 1 mile would be an advantage. I’ve have raised an IBM Idea about this.

One issue I found while playing with Locale settings is that changing the Locale to NL (Netherlands) and leaving the Language to EN (English) changes the language on the Technician application on an iPad to Dutch. This does not occur when using the same application from a desktop Mac. I’ve reported this to IBM Support, the user’s Language field should be used instead of the Locale.

Using the Start Travel button will provide the button to Stop Travel. A Labor Reporting record will have been created with the Transaction Type of TRAV, a Start Date and Start Time but empty End Date and End Time, and zero Regular Hours. The Timer Status will be set to ACTIVE. This is writing a record into one of the tables which is a financial record (LABTRANS) and Maximo may perform GL validation if you have this enabled. You cannot correct this as there is no GL account field in the application. If that occurs on Maximo Mobile when you try to synchronise your only option is to delete the transactions.

I have raised an IBM Idea for a System Property to validate at a Status that the work order GL Account is complete which if it is a valid GL code combination will avoid these errors which a technician would just find annoying, particularly as they have no means of correcting the data, and I doubt IBM would add the GL Account onto the application because of the potential large number of records to download to the device for offline working.

It is possible when using the Maximo Mobile application for the application to open a navigation application when you use the Start Travel button. There are three similar System Properties, mxe.mobile.navigation.ios is the one for an Apple device, otherwise the last part is either android or windows. The default value for the mxe.mobile.navigation.ios property is AppleMaps, but I changed this to GoogleMaps. On my iPhone when I used the Start Travel button Google Maps opened with my current location and the suggested route to my destination, I had to change it so that it showed the directions by vehicle rather than walking.

When you use the Stop Travel button the Labor Approval dialog opens. As I used the Start Travel button on one day and the Stop Travel button the next, a duration of 23 hours and 20 minutes was incorrect, but there is an option Edit Labor.

The Edit Labor button opens a side panel with the fields for the Labor Transaction of type TRAV (Travel time).

I could correct the Start Date and Time fields and the End Date and Time fields to make these accurate. The Hours field is recalculated as you make the changes. I then used the blue button to save the changes.

After using the blue button Maximo opens the Report Work screen where you can see the transaction just created under the Labor section for the logged in user HUNTER.

There is no Pause Travel option. You would Stop Travel and when you were ready to restart you can use the Start Travel button again if you are still more than a mile from your destination.

Start, Pause and Stop Work

If you have reached your destination then there are no longer any travel options but there is a blue Start Work button, which when used is replaced with Pause Work and Stop Work buttons as can be seen for work order 1285.

If you try to start another work order at the same time, for example for work order 1309-20, then you may receive a red banner message saying – Timer already started, which stops you from starting the timer on a second work order. There is a System Property maximo.mobile.allowmultipletimers which when set to 1 allows a timer to be started on multiple work orders, the default setting is 0. While the description of the System Property is – Allow multiple timers to be started in Mobile – I can verify that it does also work from the role-based application, both on desktop and iPad.

There is little difference between Pause Work and Stop Work, they both create a labor transaction record where the Timer Status is set to COMPLETE, and if you have the default Maximo settings, then for Internal Labor the record will be approved and read-only so that it cannot be changed. The difference is that when you use the Stop Work button the Report Work screen opens, because if you have stopped work the assumption is that you want to check the details before setting the work order to COMP by using the Complete Work button. 

When you Start Work, you are taken to the work order screen. I’ll change status by using the button to the left of the Priority field.

The Change Status button opens the left-hand side panel and I’ve selected In Progress (INPRG), optionally you can add a comment at the bottom of the side panel. Normally, this status would roll-down to tasks, we’ll see in the next section.

Tasks with Flow Control

Flow Control is a method where you can control the order in which tasks can be performed. A work order must be marked as being Under Flow Control and the order of tasks is determined by specifying the Predecessors, a field on each task which looks as if it is read-only, but the button next to it opens the Select Predecessors dialog. 

This article won’t go into the setup of Flow Control, but the default is that when a work order is under flow control and the work order is moved to in-progress (INPRG) then the tasks which have no predecessors are also moved to INPRG and other tasks remain at the status they were at previously. When a task is moved to Completed (COMP) status then any successor tasks that were only waiting for this predecessor to be completed are then automatically moved to INPRG. This assumes that the relationship between predecessor and successor is Finish to Start with no lag (FS0) – the successor task cannot start until immediately after the predecessor task has finished. Maximo supports all four types or precedence relationship and lead (-ve) or lag (+ve) time gaps (in hours).

We just changed work order 1285 to In Progress (INPRG) and when we use the Tasks button, Task 10 has also moved to In Progress. As the tasks 10 through 80 are serially defined, the next task is performed after its predecessor has finished, then the other seven tasks are all at Approved (APPR) state. 

Task 10 has no padlock icon, and it can be updated. The other tasks are locked as they are all under flow control.

When we complete task 10 using the blue button (status is now COMP), it shows as completed with a green tick icon. Flow Control has automatically moved Task 20 to In Progress.

We repeat the process, all the time Flow Control is deciding which tasks can move to In Progress based on its predecessors completing. Task 30 is now in progress since I complete task 20.

With only one task left to complete if you returned to the main work order screen, you’ll find that the number on the Tasks button has been reducing, this indicates the number of tasks left to complete rather that the total tasks.

When we complete the last task, in this case task 80, the Done button at the bottom right will become active.

Be careful when you complete the last task, and then use the blue Done button shown, as this will Complete the work order. You will be taken to the Report Work screen. However, if you don’t Report Work immediately the work order is no longer to be found as it has been removed from your assigned work query.

You can see the work order is now at Completed state, and this is your last chance to complete the work order before it disappears from your assigned work query. In an implementation I think this will catch out your technicians a few too many times, and so you might consider adjusting the query so that the query still shows work orders that were completed today. An alternative is to provide another work query, perhaps my assigned work orders completed in the last week.

We are now at 30 pages, and I still haven’t made it to the Reporting Work screen, which is where we will start the next (and hopefully last) article on the Technician role-based application.