Good morning and welcome to Maximo Bite Size, a podcast on the functionality of Maximo Manage. In this podcast episode I will try to explain what an upgrade to Maximo Application Suite 9.0 will mean from a functional perspective, inevitably it will introduce some technical terms.

What is Maximo Application Suite?

Maximo Application Suite, or sometimes we say MAS, is a suite of applications that together provides Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM) capabilities, IBM and MAS is a recognised leader in ALM applications.

The suite consists of a set of applications, one of which is Maximo Manage, this is the new name for what you will have recognised as Maximo in version 7.6, an Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system. For the last three years IBM has been pulling a set of different products together under the brand name of Maximo and they are the applications in MAS.

There are three Asset Performance Management (APM) applications, which work together and provide a roadmap for moving towards predictive maintenance. The first is called Monitor which is Maximo’s Internet of Things platform and which provides near real-time condition monitoring. The second is Health, you may recognise this as Maximo Asset Health Insights (MAHI), but it has come a long way since then. Apart from Asset Health scores and dashboards it has tools to perform risk based and financially optimised maintenance. The third application in the APM set is Predict, which uses AI-based predictive models to predict the expected failure date of an asset and other factors.

There are two other applications. Visual Inspection uses photos and videos to identify defects. This could be using a drone, fixed camera, or the camera on your mobile phone. You do need to train the AI models in object detection and then identification of an anomaly. The last application is Assist, which is also available from a mobile phone and currently in MAS 9.0 this uses a phone’s camera to connect the technician with an expert or supervisor to provide remote assistance, with the supervisor/expert annotating the image that they see via the technician’s camera.

Therefore, MAS is a suite of six applications Manage, Monitor, Health, Predict, Visual Inspection and Assist.

A new architecture for a new age

You will probably have heard that MAS requires more powerful servers, more processors and memory than Maximo 7.6, this is true, but MAS and Maximo 7.6 are incomparable from that perspective. The MAS architecture provides a container-based platform, Red Hat OpenShift, which is needed to run all the applications in the suite, and all the analytics, AI and extended capabilities which are expected to be added to the suite over the next few years. Approximately every 10 years software products must go through a change to their architecture if they are going to survive. In 2025 Maximo will be 40 years old and this is the 4^th time it has had to change its architecture. Can you remember, the change from client/server to web-architected? That was also an evolution of the Maximo product.

But don’t be alarmed by this. The user interface is largely the same, the database is the same, the business logic of Maximo is the same, what has changed is the platform that the old Maximo 7.6 system sat on, a webserver still exists, but there is an extra layer below this and the database. Containers share the operating system with other containers, they tend to be smaller than virtual machines and can be spun up/down quickly, they are also used to scale a system, and they are flexible in the sense that you scale the parts you need to, and not the bits that you don’t.

You may have also heard about Watsonx, IBMs AI brand that provides generative AI, machine learning and other analytics capabilities. Various aspects of MAS have already had AI components for several years. In MAS 9.0 Watsonx has been enabled including the AI Configuration application and a set of tools to make it easier to configure new AI initiatives. You will see AI being added to more and more parts of MAS in future releases.

App Connect is a general-purpose software solution for connecting data and applications and is used between Maximo and TRIRIGA, a real-estate solution, and between Maximo and Envizi, a software solution for managing sustainability and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data. You’ll see IBM bringing these products closer together in the coming years. 

With MAS you are also entitled to use Cognos Analytics version 12 for management reporting and analytics.

MAS can operate on premise, or in the cloud, IBM Cloud, AWS and Azure are supported platforms, and various components can work on edge devices close to the physical assets. This is important in near-real time condition monitoring scenarios as instruments can stream a lot of data in a short period of time and you need analytics working at the edge to detect anomalies. 

What is Maximo Manage?

Simply Maximo Manage is the new name for Maximo, it is the Manage application in the Maximo Application Suite. But as this podcast episode is primarily aimed at existing clients, I’ll continue to call it Maximo. There have been enhancements since 7.6.1.3 and I’ll be discussing most of those changes in the next podcast episode. 

Maximo has been an Enterprise Asset Management system since 2005, when the IT and Service Management capabilities were added. It consists of a set of ten core capabilities Assets, Inventory, Contracts, Purchase, Service, Planning, Work, Financial, Analytics and a set of Configuration capabilities. It will be hard to spot any differences in MAS 9.0 from what you are used to, but there are some. 

In MAS IBM bundled a set of previous add-ons into Maximo, Linear, Calibration, Mobile, Scheduler and a new one called Reliability Strategies, which you do need to install, the others are installed with Maximo – I am calling these the Included Capabilities.

Maximo still has other add-ons, Spatial, Service Provider used with customers, Health, Safety and Environment (HSE), Asset Configuration Manager (ACM) for complex assets, Optimizer which is used with Scheduler and Health, and Maximo IT which is for IT assets and configuration management. There are six industry solutions for Transportation, Utilities, Oil & Gas, Nuclear, Aviation and Civil Infrastructure. There are also a set of connectors to SAP, Oracle and WorkDay, and the two already mentioned TRIRIGA and Envizi. In MAS 9.0 IBM can also sell and support ArcGIS Enterprise from ESRI.

What are the Included Capabilities in MAS 9.0?

There are five included capabilities in MAS 9.0 the first four used to be add-ons that were separately licensed, no longer:

• Linear is used with roads, pipelines, railways, and cables where work is determined by a measured distance along the linear asset. It reaches across many applications in asset and work management and there is a visual control built into the Assets and Work Order Tracking applications. It is integrated with Spatial, but not yet fully with Maximo Mobile, although that development has started.
• Calibration is used with instrument calibration including loop calibration. It is used mainly with life sciences, and nuclear clients, but applicable to manufacturing, chemicals, oil and gas and many others. It is common to understand when assets need calibration and to understand what devices were used in the calibration. Many companies have a small calibration team. Calibration is now supported on Maximo Mobile in MAS 9.0.
• Maximo Mobile has a single application that can be downloaded onto the device with processes that can be supported offline and online. Functionality is in three main areas; work, including raising service requests and performing inspections, inventory and receiving, and assets. There is mapping and functions to support Visual Inspection and collaborating between technician and supervisor or expert using Maximo Assist. There is a set of similar role-based applications which work online only and can be used in getting started without the added complication of synchronisation of data to the mobile device.
• Scheduler is a set of eight graphical applications for short-, medium- and long-term scheduling, assignment and dispatching, and other special assignment capabilities for repair facilities, crew management and appointments. There are two dashboard applications that are used with the Optimizer for Scheduling and Dispatching and a set of administration applications.
• Reliability Strategies is the newest add-on, released in September 2023. It consists of a library of failure modes and mitigation activities for over 800 asset types. In MAS 9.0 you can now create your own library. However, the data is mainly stored in the cloud, and not in the Maximo database. While it links with assets it doesn’t yet connect with records that are used with work management, like PMs, Job Plans and Routes.

MAS Licensing

The other big change that occurred with MAS is a simplification of the licensing. There is now one part number, except for Maximo IT, and a MAS client is entitled to use all applications, add-ons, industry solutions and connectors. Licensing is based on AppPoints and the first step for most clients upgrading will be to talk with IBM or its business partners about how to convert your existing license to AppPoints. Some installations like Spatial will automatically consume AppPoints, which is why I didn’t make it an Included Capability.

It is difficult to talk about license structures in a podcast, a diagram is needed, but there are four user types, Self Service, Limited, Base or Premium, and AppPoints are consumed on a concurrent or authorized basis, authorized is a named user. There are also some Administration users. If you use the Scheduling applications, you will be at least a Base user. If you use 3^rd party mobile applications, you will be at least a Limited user. The use of a 3^rd party mobile application has always required a Maximo license.

What is important to understand is that the Limited user type gives you access to the applications of three modules, and these can include functionality associated with add-ons or industry solutions. You really do need to control your Security Groups and how they are added together, it can be very easy to add a set of people to an existing security group and then find that they now have access to applications in four or more modules and would then be either Base or Premium users. Equally, adding an application to an existing security group can push many users into another user type that consumes more AppPoints.

Many clients will have some concurrent licenses, therefore encourage your users to log out when they are not sat at their desk, and consider reducing the timeout period, perhaps to 15 minutes. The MAS system is auditing the license usage, and it will be much easier for IBM to determine the periods when you have exceeded your current AppPoints and by how much, than it was with Maximo 7.6.x.

The good news is that you are entitled to use everything, which makes proof of concept or proof of value projects much easier to start, as you no longer need to discuss licenses with IBM first. When planning your upgrade, if you have thought about using Transportation or HSE or another add-on, then consider having it installed as part of your upgrade, as you can control who has access to the applications, probably with no increase to your AppPoint requirements initially. That will help you discover and deploy the functionality step by step without getting into the situation where you have unused licenses, as some clients have found in the past.

What differences do I need to be aware of?

For end users there are some user interface changes to be aware of, nothing too dramatic, unless you still have field labels on the left instead of above the field, it will now be above, and you cannot change this, there is no longer the option to deploy a different skin.

Buttons are no longer below a table window, they are above it, there is a New Row button, and a blue Actions button with a drop-down. You will wonder where the More Search Fields menu has gone when you first log in, and you might notice other changes like a toggle instead of a check box. 

One thing you will notice is the next page/previous page buttons in a table, they are below the table, and not above it. If there is a vertical scroll, you need to scroll down to find it, to then scroll back up to see the next record in the set. Therefore, for List tabs, you might want to consider configuring the number of rows per page, which is a simple change in Application Designer. 

Why the change to the user interface? There is a standard across the whole of IBM based on the Carbon design. It defines the colours, fonts, layouts, icons, etc that can be used in what is called the Pattern Asset Library. The user interface uses React a JavaScript library that responds to the size and orientation of the device it is being used on. It runs in a browser, but it is also supported with native mobile applications. 

The IBM team are building a configuration tool, which many call the Maximo Application Framework, although the configuration tool is just one part of this. This can be used with new applications, mobile and role-based applications. The configuration tool has certainly come a long way, but it not quite to the same level as Application Designer. 

For administrators the biggest change is that users are now defined in the suite Administration application, and people/users are synchronised down to Maximo Manage. There will need to be a new password when you upgrade to MAS, as the username/password are stored in a MongoDB database. AppPoint entitlements will also need to be associated with users in the Administration application and there may be some other aspects which administrators will need to become familiar with.

For implementers of Maximo, then look out if the client is using Work Centers or Maximo Anywhere as neither are supported in MAS 9.0. Unfortunately, if you do a careful like for like comparison with the equivalent role-based applications, you will find some gaps, you will also find some additions which didn’t exist in the Work Centers or Maximo Anywhere.

Bing Maps and Google Maps are no longer supported in MAS 9.0, you need to use ArcGIS Server, ArcGIS Online maps or OpenStreetMaps.

From a database perspective you need to be on a minimum supported database, DB2 11.5 SE, Oracle 19.3 or SQLServer 2019, if you aren’t then you will need to upgrade your database as part of the process of migrating your data.

You may need to recompile your BIRT reports as BIRT 4.8 is now supported and be careful some TRIM functions in SQLServer have changed, so do test your most complex and important BIRT reports to tease out any database differences.

For integration instead of JMS queues you should now move to Kafka. Also test out user authentication, LDAP and SAML are supported.

The big change in upgrading to MAS was the change to the Red Hat Open Shift platform. It does take a while to learn the new skills needed, and many Maximo clients are choosing to leave this to their IBM Business Partner. MAS is more than three years old now, and there are existing and new clients who are live on MAS, and many more in the pipeline. MAS 9.0 is an incremental upgrade to MAS 8.11, it was nearly called MAS 8.12, but IBM wanted to align all application in the suite to the same version number, it is not a dot zero release in the traditional sense, something to avoid and leave to others.

For existing clients on Maximo 7.6.0.10, 7.6.1.2 or 7.6.1.3 you can upgrade directly to MAS 9.0. you do not need to go via MAS 8.x. End of support for Maximo 7.6 releases is 30^th September 2025, now less than a year away.

IBM Lifecycle Policy for MAS

I thought I would finish with looking ahead to your next upgrade after you have upgraded to MAS. Maximo has been on an agile continuous development process for many years. IBM is aligning its products to provide new releases once per year in June. They will support three releases, which means that any one release has a life of 3 years. This means that you should look to upgrade perhaps every year or perhaps every two years. 

You should also consider when in the calendar year is a good time to upgrade. If you upgrade at the end of March, you have 27 months of support left, this is OK if you upgrade once a year, but if you upgrade once every two years then you should consider a period between September and December. Ideally you determine a future policy to follow and align your internal changes to fit in with those.

What is interesting, is that the Maximo product team will soon introduce a Feature Channel where you can receive released new features up to a year early that can be reviewed and tested in a development or test environment, but you are not allowed to move this to production until after the June release. These new features will receive IBM Support and I’ll be able to write articles about them in Maximo Secrets. I have already seen a couple of references on LinkedIn from IBM employees about new features coming in MAS 9.1, I presume then this is already available internally to IBM.

A short recap

• MAS is a big infrastructure/platform change that uses Red Hat OpenShift and is based on containers. It is the sort of change which software products must make roughly every 10 years. If you haven’t considered using a cloud provider, now is the time to do so.
• Your Maximo 7.6 database will have new objects and attributes but there is no change to your data.
• Licensing has changed to AppPoints, it is a much simpler licensing model than Maximo 7.6, but you do need a conversation with IBM first, don’t delay.
• Work Centers and Maximo Anywhere are no longer supported. You do need to check out what parts of these applications you use and whether the functionality exists in the role-based applications and any configuration will need to be reworked.
• There are some user interface changes. Set up a test system and ask all users to log in for 15 minutes and test out the new changes. A short document to assist users will help.
• User administration is now made at the suite level, so administrators will need to learn some new tools.
• You should review your security groups and application rights and determine what security groups can be combined to ensure that users stay within the license user types that have been allocated. Administrators should know how to check their company’s compliance to licensed AppPoints and to check this status regularly. A sudden jump in AppPoint usage may be because of a change to Security Groups. It might be an idea to audit and/or add an electronic signature to Security Group changes, either that or keep a manual log of changes you make.

I hope you enjoyed this podcast episode, and I look forward to seeing you on the next one when we will review what’s new in Maximo Manage 9.0. 

The music is called xxx from the group called TrackTribe, please check them out on TrackTribe.Com, all one word. 

Until another time, goodbye.