A mobile app for Maximo Locations

As I have written since the earliest versions of MAS, the Maximo Application Framework (MAF) is one of the major innovations that entices a customer to migrate from Maximo EAM. With each release, the role-based applications (RBAs) become more complete, more functional, and, I personally would say, more beautiful. Similarly, Maximo Mobile is being expanded with new applications to cover all the operations that make sense in the field.

But there is still a long way to go, and sometimes we find ourselves without an adequate response to contingent needs. For example, some of our customers make heavy use of locations as maintenance objects, and field technicians may need to work on them. Since there is no dedicated MAF application, we tried to create one along the lines of the standard Mobile Asset Manager app.

By copying it, we got an application that allows technicians to work on their locations and create new ones at will. They can edit location details, including specifications and associated meters, change its status, classify it, associate it with photos and attachments, and view it on a map. All of this can be also done offline. But, you know, "the more you get, the more you want," so we added the drilldown functionality and the list of assets within the location, with the ability to go into detail and create new ones.

Visualizing the location tree took some time because there is no canonical way to do it, so we evaluated different options in the framework and similar solutions like the one in the "Service Requests" app. The chosen approach is of course completely subjective, but I like it a lot.

This development served us to further refine our skills in developing with MAF, addressing a need that perhaps several companies have today while waiting for a standard predefined app.

In case, feel free to contact me.