I thought I'd share my organization's experience with Sites and the alternative approach we used. I'm not the main person who manages this stuff, but I'll do my best to describe what has been done anyway.

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My organization was guided to, and chose to not to use sites. Or should I say, all of our divisions use a single site.

Reason: As far as we could tell, sites didn't offer the flexibility we needed.

• We need to share many, if not all Maximo objects between all divisions. Examples:
  • Work Orders and SRs
  • Purchasing
  • Assets & Locations
  • Tools & Rotating Items
  • Inventory, Items, Storerooms, & Companies
    Pretty much everything.
    
• Like most organizations, we use security groups (aligned with licensing to a degree) to manage who can access what: applications, actions, etc..
  Security isn't usually based on divisions (departments), it's based on the kind of position a user has:
  • Examples:
  • INTERNALRES (workers)
  • SACOORDINATORS (service area coordinators)
  • SELFSR
  • SRPROCESSORS
  • SUPER_USERS
  • SUPERVISORS
  • BUSINESSSUP

• Other than the inherent hiding functionality that comes with security groups, we don't need to hide any parts of Maximo from anyone (i.e. hiding one division's records from another division). It's ok if all users can see all parts of Maximo.
• We only need to restrict editing records for certain key Maximo objects. This restriction is based on divisions (departments).
• We did this by creating custom DIVISION fields in many Maximo objects, including adding a DIVISION field to the PERSON table.
• And we created global data restrictions for restricting who can edit records.

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• • Your Security Group(s) allow you to edit Locations
    AND
  • Your Division matches the Location Division
    AND
  • The Location's source is not GIS (all GIS Locations are read-only -- their system of record is a separate system; integrated to Maximo)
    
    (We've got a couple more global data restrictions based on division that are in the works too -- like PMs.)
    
    

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It can get pretty interesting: staff can end up working in multiple divisions, on assets and locations from multiple divisions, as required. Example, the guy that maintains the pools for the recreation center division also drives snow plows for the roads division during snow storms. And a mechanic in the fleet division can work on vehicles from outside companies/agencies. And those agencies buy our inventory items from us too. Also, WOs and SRs can get passed around between divisions.

I've exaggerated some of those examples a bit, and haven't totally covered them in the above documentation. But I think it gives you an idea of the kind of flexibility that we needed.

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It's entirely possible that we misinterpreted the functionality/limitations of sites. We fumbled through some of Maximo's complexities at first. If we did mix something up, it's far too late to go back now! :)

In summary, we use division fields and global data restrictions instead of sites. And it seems to be working well for us. Hopefully someone finds this interesting or helpful. Or maybe it's a somewhat common approach?

#Maximo
#AssetandFacilitiesManagement

I went and found the original specification around organizations and sites (their have been many enhancements since, including expanding security capabilities).  According to the doc an organization is "a legal entity within a big corporation that can have many sites/facilities. Each organization has a chart of accounts so that the sites in an organization can share them".  A Site "represents a facility, in our example, a power plant. An existing Maximo installation in a work location is analogous to a site. The equipments, work orders, job plans, safety plans, PMs etc will all be defined at thesite level. This ensures that each site has its own unique equipment, locations, storerooms etc. Except purchase agreements all other transactions/documents like work order creation, reservation, reorder, receiving, purchase order creation will be restricted within a site". 

I think the original intent of site is, in its simplest form, the same as your division.  You can give everyone access to all sites.  Labor are at the org level, so they can do the multiple jobs.  And, if set up correctly, read or other limited access at the site(division) level can also be achieved via security groups.

steve

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Steve Hauptman
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The challenge of a single site when there are valid business entities which are in fact funded separately, managed separately, have unique assets, locations etc. is that when it is all piled into a single entity your location hierarchy become overly complex and difficult to manage.  The storerooms now have to be logically separated on a business contract you create (as opposed to already in the system, Yes you can do additional work in your security groups but it is just that, additional work.)

What you have done is not wrong by any stretch.  But is now a bit more complex that perhaps otherwise would be.  I will say this:  If it is working for you and you have the tools in place to properly manage your data and operations, do NOT attempt to split the single site into multiple.  I did this recently for a customer and it was a royal PITA.  The work is still not complete.  There were VERY good reasons for doing so in the case I cite:  There were a million (okay 970,000 plus) assets that users in the Fleet operations had to contend with when they actually only had about 5,000.  Also the locations were configured in such a way that every physical location ( in this case schools) had "logical" locations which did not in fact exist in reality.  (Think pools.... ugh!)

So to sum up, if you can separate the assets, locations, job plans etc. that are "site" based on your division attribute (hopefully you are using automation scripts and conditional expressions,) then you are at least able to manage the situation.  Thanks for sharing.

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Bradley K. Downing , MBA
Solutions Engineer
IBM
Bakersfield CA
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