Inspections are an important tool for asset-intensive companies and have broad use across many industries including: car seal inspections, tank inspections, fire extinguisher inspections, emergency lighting, general site inspections, etc. Within the transportation industry, they are utilized as a tool to extend the life of a vehicle and ensure all compliance requirements are met. Yet, employees face many challenges when the inspection forms are not well structured. For example:
- Work Order Creation: The inability to have work orders easily created from the issues that are identified on an inspection report
- Ease of Use: Each user cannot easily access the inspection form that is relevant to a specific asset
Maximo Work Centers solves these two problems by automatically creating work orders for the issues that are identified and allowing users to easily access inspection forms in one place.
Background
The Conduct an Inspection application is a new Maximo Work Centre, with a UI entirely distinct from traditional Maximo. With Work Centres, Maximo’s design becomes mobile-responsive and can easily be used on any device – laptops, cell phones, or tablets. Work Centres are a modernization of the traditional browser-based, Java backend Maximo model that uses web development technologies such as CSS, HTML, and JavaScript to create a more modern and reactive Maximo interface.
Work Order Creation
The goal of an inspection is to ensure that all parts of the asset are running as they should and if not, to take action on the issues identified. Maintenance crews work long shifts so simplifying their administrative work helps reduce the hours spent logging issues and communicating the steps required to fix them. Instead, the user can create work orders, in real-time, for the issues as they fill out the inspection form.
In Work Centers, navigate to the “Manage Inspection Forms” page and select the “Create Form” button.
Enter a form name and then begin to add questions.
Choose the “Selectable responses” as a response field. Create any number of options as a response to the question. In this case, we are simply looking for a binary response for each inspection. In the “Require Action” column, indicate which option will generate a work order by clicking the slider that corresponds to that option.
When the inspection form is filled with all content and saved, enable work order creation for items that require action. Do this by first clicking on the gear associated with the desired revision.
In the Form Settings menu, identify the available actions and select the OSACTION.MXAPIINSPRESULT.CREATEWO automation script to create work orders for items that require action in the inspection form.
Note: There will be one automation script included in the OOTB version. However, more automation scripts are available through the automation script app.
When completing the inspection form, the user can now automatically create a work order for all responses that are tied to this automation script. As seen below, an issue was identified in the dash instruments so the user indicated that this was an issue and will now have the chance to create a work order.
After the inspection is complete, any items that require action are batched and the option is presented to the user to create a work order.
When this option is selected, a system message appears indicating that the action was executed and a work order was created for all items with issues, as seen below in the red box.
The work order is now visible in both the work order tracking application and the work execution application. Below, you can see that the work order number matches the one that was generated when the actions were batched in the inspection form. This added visibility will allow the business to track inspections more closely.
The work order’s description notes that it needs a follow-up and it references the inspection number. In addition, the Location, Asset number and description, WO status, status date, and GL Account have all carried over to this work order.
Navigate to the “Plans” menu and refer to the “Tasks for Work Orders” section, as seen below. Each issue identified in the inspection completed is visible, within this work order, as its own task for the user to address.
Ease of Use
As noted, it is challenging to conduct an inspection when the forms are not easily accessible. For instance, a driver may have a different inspection form for each vehicle and when she needs to do an inspection on a 4 Axle Trailer, she wants to be able to pull up only those questions related to this vehicle. Conditional formatting can help her by creating conditions on inspection questions.
First, click the conditional formatting icon for the desired revision:
From here, conditions can be created that allows the user to see only the questions that are relevant to the asset they are inspecting. There should be a question that triggers the list of subsequent questions that the user will see. In this case, it is: “What type of Vehicle?” Based on the response to this, a list of questions should appear for the user that is only relevant for that vehicle selected. (In this example, the questions relevant to a 4 Axle tractor are 2 through 4 and the questions relevant to a 4 Axle Trailer are 5 through 7). Select the type of vehicle in the dialogue box and then click the magnifying glass below to select a response field.
Once the magnifying glass is selected, a window appears on the right-hand side with all possible questions on the form. Click on the question that is relevant for that vehicle. Then continue to create conditions in the same manner for each question that corresponds to this asset.
Once the inspection form is set up and made active, the user can conduct an inspection for a specific asset. For example, when a 4 Axle Trailer is selected as the type of vehicle, the user is taken through only the relevant questions 5,6, and 7 while questions 2, 3, and 4 are not visible to them:
Overall, having a robust system for inspections will help users:
- keep all inspections in one place and accessible to the user
- navigate through the inspection process
- take action immediately
- experience less time wasted collecting materials
- experience less risk of incomplete work orders
- experience less mining through irrelevant material
- add visibility
- give more effective communication across the business.
