Maximo Secrets

A site dedicated to Maximo containing over 350 articles, podcast episodes and YouTube videos, updated weekly.

Maximo History – 1996 to 1998 – Years of Growth

It is a beautiful late afternoon in North Devon and the week is now over. I have a beer to hand, and I am listening to a recording of the Wigmore Hall concert from Monday lunchtime which I attended, a piano recital with a selection of Brahms Hungarian Dances, piano duets, and the four Schubert Impromptus D899, Op. 90, performed by Elisabeth Leonskaja and Mihály Berecz taking the Primo part of the duets. It was excellent and lunchtime concerts are great value, if you are in London, try it out.

I rejoined PSDI in late October 1996 having been out of work for 12 weeks, the only time in my working life where this has been the case, a frightening prospect for anyone with a young family, the savings on 4 years of contracting being whittled away at an alarming rate. I had two offers to consider, one with PSDI to work on Maximo, it was a good choice, and on my first day I was straight into a client meeting where I would be the PSDI Project Manager on a project already running behind time.

Old school project management meant that the person you placed as a Project Manager needed to be someone with knowledge of the project and industry, you didn’t put a rig in the North Sea unless the Project Manager had experience of doing just this. My previous PM roles had adopted the same philosophy and so I started my journey of getting to know everything about Maximo. The functional footprint of Maximo in 1996 is a small fraction of what it is today. There were no Industry Solutions, few add-ons and the core Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) applications and configuration toolset of Maximo were extended significantly during its second decade.

The PSDI UK office had moved from Berkeley Square to Wimbledon in South London and now to Sheerwater, a suburb of Woking, Surrey. PSDI renamed itself MRO Software and we later moved closer to Woking town centre to expand our office space once again. PSDI UK had grown rapidly, PSDI across Europe and the rest of the world expanded as no doubt it also did in the US. The period 1996-1998 were the “Years of Growth” in all senses.

Revenue grew 45% to $73.329m in financial year to 30th September 1996, then 31% to $96.700m in 1997, 24% to $120.016 in 1998 and a further 21% to $145.66m in 1999. The number of full-time employees also grew. I couldn’t find a figure for 1995, but in the 3.5 years from March 1993 to September 1996 PSDI grew from 300 to 414 employees, but in the following 3 years we had grown to 745 employees, adding 75 employees in 1997, 130 in 1998 and a further 126 in 1999. A lot of employees were added to the company in the 5 years after the flotation of PSDI on the NASDAQ exchange on the 21st April 1994, more than doubling the size of the company.

Maximo Series 5 Main Menu – Maximo 3.0a was almost identical

In January 1996 Maximo 3.0a was launched, the first Maximo system I would get to know intimately, the user manuals I still use occasionally today. This is a screenshot from Maximo Series 5 two years earlier, by Maximo 3.0a the Notes module was replaced with Custom Apps.

If you saw a Maximo 3.0a system today I think you would recognise it. The Equipment module had applications for Locations, Equipment (later renamed Assets), Failure Codes and Condition Monitoring, locations supported multiple location systems, hierarchical or network. Job Plans supported tasks (called operations), labor, materials and tools, but not services. Preventive Maintenance called PM Masters supported both time and meter-based PMs with Job Plan Sequences. There was Inventory with reorder routines, but no Item Master, the Issues and Transfers application was used before Inventory Usage became available in a much later Maximo release. The Purchasing processes supported PR, PO, service and material receipts, and there was an Invoices application, no Request for Quotations yet. Work Requests were used instead of Service Requests, there was of course Work Order Tracking, and Quick Reporting, Work Manager was a precursor to Assignment Manager, it is why the application name for Assignment Manager is called WORKMAN. Maximo 3.0a supported General Ledger configuration and GL transactions were created for both debit and credit accounts across different financial processes.

The configuration toolset included Database Configuration, but you couldn’t add fields to the provided tables, only change the field type and length of a set of additional fields added to the Maximo database to allow some configuration. However, you could create an Extra Table, an extension table. You could create Custom Applications and Equipment, Location and Item Specifications, all of these were single tables, there wasn’t the ability to relate multiple custom tables together. You could change the screens and dialog boxes using Edit Windows. You could create Value Lists (Domains) and there was the concept of synonyms. Reporting used the language called SQR3 and was developed using SQR3 Workbench.

Maximo 3.0a supported Oracle, Sybase (May 1996) and SQLBase, all SQL databases. Oracle v7 did not yet support triggers, but the support for Oracle allowed Maximo to be used with much larger clients. Sybase and Microsoft had co-developed SQL Server, but they split in August 1994. In March 1997 PSDI announced that Maximo now supported Microsoft SQL Server v6.5.

In 1996, Maximo 3.0a had integration with PSDI’s Project Software package PROJECT/X (P/X), it was called the Maximo Scheduler. P/X was no longer available as a stand-alone system, revenue from P/X was now less than $1m. This was not the only integration, Maximo 3.0a introduced a new Oracle Accounting API for tracking purchases, invoices and expense reports.

A 5-user Maximo system would set you back $40,000. It was supported on Windows 3.1 and Windows NT and Unix Servers.

Today, the functional footprint of Maximo 3.0a would be considered a reasonable CMMS system, this was 30 years ago.

Maximo customization was introduced in release 2.0 as a way for customers and consultants to add individual changes and extend the functionality of Maximo for client needs. The Developer’s Kit was extended in Maximo 3.0a and subsequent releases through to Maximo 4.1.1 which was the end of the Centura SQLWindows version of Maximo. Application hooks, for example, MCWOPreApprove, MCWOPostApprove, allowed custom code to be added, in this case functions before or after work order approval, and the whole compiled into the MAXCUST.DLL file. As the Maximo functional footprint expanded, so to the number of hooks where custom code could be added.

By the end of 1996 the first Professional Services utility had been developed to further extend the customization capability by consultants without the need for coding. The Dynamic Value List was coded into the MAXCUST.DLL, it enabled a lookup of values based on the value in another data field, for example Region and Area, where an Area belongs to a Region.

Maximo ADvantage a single user system based on Microsoft Access

On 1st March 1996, PSDI acquired Maintenance Automation Corporation (“MAC”) and their product called Chief Advantage, it was renamed Maximo ADvantage. This was a single user system based on Microsoft Access, first released in 1992, it supported bar codes. PSDI spent more than they anticipated adding necessary functionality and improving the quality, and these additional costs continued through the first half of 1997.

MAXIMO Enterprise became the Oracle and Sybase system, and in July 1996 PSDI released MAXIMO Workgroup, running on SQLBase or Oracle 7 Workgroup Server, SQLServer would be added in March 1997. There was now three Maximo systems targeted at different sized companies and budgets.

In 1996 PSDI had offices across US and in UK, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden and Australia. Maximo was being used by more than 800 clients in over 4000 sites. In January 1997 PSDI had also announced that it had opened offices in Argentina, Hong Kong, and Thailand. By the end of 1997 offices in Canada and India were added to this list. There was also a large network of international sales agents. 

In early 1997 PSDI’s founder Bob Daniels stepped down as CEO and was replaced by David Sample and in April PSDI moved from Cambridge, MA to much larger offices, 110,000 square feet, at 100 Crosby Drive, Bedford, MA. The lease including a renewal option after 6 years would provide offices to December 31, 2009. However, in a little more than one year David Sample moved on, and in May 1998 Chip Drapeau was elected President and CEO with Bob Daniels returning as executive Chairman of the Board.

In the ComputerWorld archives I found three more articles:

Nov 25th 1996 – Online manuals – Maintenance supervisors soon will be able to toss out those stacks of equipment specifications cluttering their offices. Project Software and Development, Inc. (PSDI) in Cambridge, Mass., is launching a World Wide Web site that it describes as “an online encyclopaedia of maintenance equipment information.”

Called MRO-online (www.MRO-online.com), the site will include first hand data on equipment such as generators as well as links to manufacturers’ Web pages. As an added bonus, users of PSDI’s Maximo maintenance management software can drag and drop information from the site into the Maximo database. The site is scheduled to debut by year’s end.

Sep 8th 1997 – New OLAP tool for Maximo, called Maximo Analyzer. This was launched in August 1997 and was based on Cognos PowerPlay.

Oct 6th 1997 – A version of Maximo to run on handheld devices like PalmPilot, mainly aimed at electric utilities and used by New York Power Authority. These mobile applications did not have cellular communications; they needed to be hooked up to a desktop to download the information. There were three applications in the MAXIMO Mobile Application Suite:

By the end of 1997 Maximo 3.0.2 was launched with support for Dutch, German, Spanish, French and Swedish languages. It was not Year 2000 (Y2K) compliant. The default century was 19 rather than 20, SQR report prompts were two-digit years and Centura which was the software used for Maximo applications needed a change to recognise a date entered in the right century.

In March 1998, PSDI released Maximo 4.0 in English and by the summer Maximo 4.0 was available in the primary languages of Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Latin American Spanish, and Swedish. Maximo 4.0 was also not Y2K compliant.

With 18 months to go clients had to upgrade to either Maximo 3.0.3 or Maximo 4.0.1 to obtain a Y2K compliant version. It was not a complicated upgrade for clients on Maximo 3.x, more awkward for older versions as they needed to upgrade to Maximo 3.x first. However, getting around all the client bases took some effort, we were extremely busy, rarely did we find there was no budget, it was an imperative. It was also a rather tedious job, recompiling all SQR reports and the MAXCUST.DLL, then exporting and reimporting all equipment, location and item specifications and custom applications.

Across Europe there was a second issue forcing an upgrade, the introduction of the Euro, first as a virtual currency in 1999 with notes and coins introduced on 1st January 2002, and by this date invoices had to be in Euros. Maximo 4.0.1 was the version that supported the Euro, it introduced the second base currency. By March 1999 Maximo 4.0.1 was available in French, Swedish, German and Dutch, I presume Spanish and Portuguese became available later. A script was provided to switch base currencies. Being in the UK we avoided this, although a few companies adopted the second base currency, for EUR or USD.