Click Maximo Integration Gateway

Introduction

With ever increasing pressure on field service organisations or internal service departments to deliver faster and more agile services at lower and lower cost, there is greater and greater emphasis being placed on ensuring that work schedules are optimised and resources fully utilised. Tivoli Maximo provides a class-leading capability for the work management process - with the notable exception that it does not have an integral scheduling capability.

Historically – within a traditional maintenance environment - planners have overcome the scheduling deficiencies of Maximo with integration to project planning tools such as MS Project or Primavera. Whilst these tools may suit the resource levelling and task scheduling requirements for a package of work executed by local resources (such as a Turnaround or Project), they are not geared towards the challenge of dynamic and multi-faceted scheduling in a service-oriented organisation.

For a service-oriented organisation, there are often many conflicting constraints and objectives present when scheduling work (maximizing resource utilisation, minimizing non-productive travel time, ensuring service levels are met, matching skill requirements of the tasks with the skills of the workforce etc.). For a small number of jobs and a small workforce, dispatchers and planners are able to effectively balance these objectives, however once the number of resources reaches 20-25, then it is accepted that manual scheduling is not longer effective and an automated scheduling tool is needed.

Peacock Engineering Ltd - building on their deep knowledge of both Tivoli Maximo and Click Schedule - has developed the Click Maximo Integration Gateway to provide real-time message exchange between these two class-leading solutions. This document provides an overview of the solution.

Work Management

Maximo provides an extremely flexible framework for managing work - designed to meet the different approaches that industries; organisations and departments within organisations have towards managing and scheduling work. The work management scale within Maximo might go from a simple, short IT service call requiring a single resource to spend a few minutes resolving a problem; right through to a remote crew of field service technicians being brought together at the right time to execute a technically complex package of work over several days where service levels are tight, labour and materials need to be captured and all aspects of the work need to be recorded.

Within Maximo there are a number of Applications for Managing work. These can be grouped into two main objects of Ticket and Work Order.

The Ticket Object is designed to receive requests for work (typically from sources external to the department or organisation responsible for managing the work). The ticket supports the application of service level agreements and provides the link through related records to other work elements. The ticket does not support the sophisticated planning of work and is not designed to capture detailed actual resource usage. The Ticket does support being assigned to Owner Groups and Owners where simple allocation to a resource is required.

The work order object is sophisticated in its design in that it supports detailed planning and hierarchical organisation of work orders into a work package. Dependencies can be established between work orders (albeit on a Finish-Start basis), and multiple crafts and quantities of any given craft can be planned against a work order or task. Planned resources against a work order are represented as Assignments. Like the ticket object, the work order object supports the application of service level agreements. The work order also has a number of date fields for managing the planning and scheduling.

Click Software - Click Schedule

There are two versions of Click Schedule – The enterprise (Click Schedule) version and ClickIMRS which is mid-tier reduced functionality variant of the enterprise product. It is not intended to describe fully the features of these versions in this document, although in its base form, the Click Maximo Integration Gateway has been developed to support both versions.

Click Schedule, as its name suggests, is a sophisticated scheduling platform, capable of optimising across multiple crews, multi work period activities and for large numbers of tasks and resources using complex rules and objectives.

Click IMRS is still a powerful scheduling tool, but is targeted at scheduling single resource, single work period and independent tasks. IMRS retains the ability to schedule using a complex mix of rules and objectives for a maximum of 500 resources.

The Click Maximo Integration Gateway (CMIG)

Recognising the flexibility offered by a Click-Maximo combination, the CMIG has been developed and priced as an enabler to the development of a client-specific implementation delivered through installation of the base gateway and professional services to extend and configure the integration framework to meet the defined requirements of the client.

Baseline CMIG

The baseline CMIG has been developed for use with both Click Schedule and ClickIMRS. It is currently available for Maximo 7.1.1.x.

The CMIG has been developed to provide bi-directional, real-time integration between Click and Maximo for Service Requests and Work Orders/Assignments. The scope of these is outlined in the following sections.

Additionally, uni-directional integration has been developed to pass Technician information from Maximo to Click. This includes Craft and Skill profiles for each Technician.

Service Request Integration

The baseline CMIG supports the scheduling of Maximo Service Requests to a single resource for work executed within a single work period. Scheduling can be to the next available resource or through use of the Click Appointment functionality delivery through the Maximo SR application. Any re-scheduling or optimisation activity that changes scheduled dates or the technician assigned to the Service Requests will be reflected in Maximo.

Work Order/Assignment Integration

The Maximo work order provides a sophisticated framework for managing work. It is however also very open and flexible in terms of the options that a user has in specifying work plans and managing execution of work. As such it is considered to be un-realistic to incorporate, within the baseline CMIG, integration to Click that would cover all possible scenarios.

The baseline CMIG provides bi-directional Work Order Assignment scheduling based on the planned labour requirements specified on a work order.

Where supported by the Click product variant, this will include the scheduling of work across multiple work periods, but does not include any assignment dependency or scheduling of work at Work Order Task level.

Configuration and Implementation Statement of Work Development

The CMIG pricing includes a professional services element (excluding Expenses) for the development of an outline statement of work with the client team. This statement of work will define the high-level requirements for the development of the baseline CMIG to support the full requirements for work scheduling. From this statement of work, Peacock Engineering will be able to provide a commercial proposal for the development and delivery of the full integration between Click and Maximo.

Should you want to understand more about Click IMRS or the integration gateway between Click and Maximo, please contact us.