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To help Enterprise Asset Managers reap the full benefits of Maximo quicker, these five tips can help simplify Maximo’s services:

Scope of Maximo

Maximo can be a beast of a program because of all the functionality it includes. It helps to break it down into six primary functions as you decide which areas your particular organization and department needs:

• Asset management provides the ability to track and manage asset data through the lifecycle.
• Work management offers concept to completion management of planned and unplanned work activities.
• Service management lets you define offerings, create service level agreements and monitor service delivery.
• Contract management gives control over all aspects of contract management.
• Inventory management lets you know the details of all assets in the inventory.
• Procurement management supports all phases of enterprise wide procurement.

This will allow you to choose which areas to implement first, and you can combine functionality from different modules to meet your needs. Begin with the end in mind, and you will better be able to set options within the application, tailored to your business, and leverage additional areas of Maximo over time.

Maximo is Scalable

Maximo has tools that allow asset managers to configure or even customize it. For many organizations, configuring is a better option than customization. Customization requires a bigger budget, more IT resources, and can result in IBM not providing the same level of support. In general, only large organizations should go the customization route. There are plenty of configuration options embedded in Maximo that will allow you to customize workflows, menus, conditional UIs, escalations and push button actions.

Scale can go up as well as down. Maximo provides tools to simplify the user interaction, to get more and better data into the application, with validation options and the ability go mobile, out of the box.

Integration Abilities

Maximo’s framework allows managers to integrate its application data with other applications within your organization or with external systems. The framework consists of predefined content that facilitates integration with a number of business objects. There is a tool kit available to extend predefined integration content and to include new integration points.

Maximo will not be the system of record for everything, and the integration framework allows you to support your full enterprise – gathering data from other sources, as well as pushing Maximo data out to them, so you avoid silos of data, and double entry for the same thing.

Tracking Costs and Hours

With this background information, asset managers can hit the ground running and reap the benefits of Maximo quicker after installation. Maximo tracks cost and hours, not just to the general ledger (GL), but to the asset, and up the hierarchy for facilities and operations, ultimately helping in monitoring and therefore reducing cots in the long run.

Your facility operations bills let you know how much you spend. Maximo allows you to tie maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) costs to your assets, and allows you to make more financial based decisions on upgrades, overhauls, replacements, etc.

Reporting Tools
Maximo collect such a vast amount of data through various applications and gives you the power to see, transform and act on that data through over 100 pre-built reports. These include BIRT and Query based reporting. The data in Maximo can also be connected to many third-party reporting tools.

Whether you utilize the reporting tools provided with Maximo, or already have a reporting suite to leverage, you will be able to generate the necessary reports, charts, graphs, dashboards and more. These visualizations will server to provide summary as well as detailed information depicting actual results as well as future plans.

Author of the article, Mr. Steve Richmond is the founder and CEO of Projetech Inc., a Tivoli Award Winning IBM Business Partner. Born in Los Angeles, California; raised in Cincinnati, Ohio and educated at the University of Cincinnati, he began his working career in the mechanical contracting business. Steve founded Projetech in 1990. He has led, driven and grown Projetech to success as the largest IBM Maximo as a Service provider in the world.

Steve is a published author and accomplished speaker. He maintains certification and affiliation with the Society of Maintenance and Reliability Professionals (SMRP), the Association of Facilities Engineers (AFE) and the Building Owners and Management Institute (BOMI