Case Study: Integrating IBM Maximo with the cloud

IBM’s Maximo is probably one of the most popular tools for Enterprise Asset Management. Key features of Maximo include the management of Assets, Work, SLAs, Contracts, Inventory and Procurement. One of our clients, one of the largest Facilities Maintenance companies in the US, uses Maximo to assign and track work assigned to field workers (electricians, plumbers etc..) who visit client sites for service requests. While Maximo has cloud applications, the application overall is too complicated to be used by most maintenance workers. The client decided to build a custom mobile front end to Maximo to facilitate the data entry process on site.

Work orders were created directly in Maximo as a back-office function. Equipment and Parts can be added or checked out by field workers. These Work Orders were synced to the Mobile front end and kept there for local, offline viewing when the service agent did not have network coverage. The field agents could view the details of their work orders, make changes to it, add pictures and audio notes against the work order and lookup other people in the area who could help with the problem. The device kept track of the number of hours spent and logged then back to Maximo as Labor hour entries.

The overall platform also supported the integration of other WO systems like Corrigo with the mobile device. The diagram below describes a high level architecture of the application.

The entire solution is built using Microsoft .NET framework 4.0 and designed to be hosted in house or on Azure Cloud services.

Business benefits of the solution:

• Reduced WO training time
• Increased Field Worker Productivity
• Location specific feature enablement
• More accurate tracking of hours

The name of the client has not been shared intentionally but can be provided on request.