I thought I'd share a technique that saved our Maximo project (a while back).Summary: Let users enter flattened/horizontal data into a a single sheet (include all related data as columns, instead of vertical rows in separate tables/sheets).
Details:
Originally, the team that implemented our system wanted non-technical stakeholders to enter hierarchical data as "vertical tables" into Excel.
For example:
Classifications had to be entered into multiple tables/sheets: CLASSSTRUCTURE, CLASSUSEWITH, CLASSSPEC, and CLASSSPECUSEWITH. Then those four sheets/tables were flattened into a MasterConfig sheet. And then that was copy/pasted into MxLoader, cleaned, and loaded into Maximo.
To be honest, that was a complete nightmare and threatened to derail the project.
As an alternative, I let users enter their classifications in a single flattened/horizontal table (instead of the four vertical tables).
USEWITH rows and SPEC rows were pivoted into individual columns. That let the user enter a single row for the entire classification, including USEWITH and SPEC information.
Advantages:
Data entry was really easy.
I was also able to set up helper columns that checked for problems in the data. It was really helpful to catch issues right as the user was entering them, instead of Maximo rejecting the data at load time. Forcing us to go back, fix the data, and try again.
Disadvantages:
Needed many individual columns for USEWITH and SPECs. But that was manageable in our case, especially since I used true Excel tables via "CTRL+T". With true Excel tables, when I inserted a new column, Excel automatically named the column -- including the next number in the sequence (like "SPEC 30"), which was handy. Another advantage of true Excel tables is: you only need to enter a formula once...Excel automatically fills the entire column with the formula...just like a calculated field in an SQL query. Filtering is built into the table too.
Note:
Depending on the data load method, it might be necessary to un-pivot the data back into vertical rows. Un-pivoting is easy with Excel Power Query. For anyone who hasn't used Excel Power Query, I recommend you look into it. It lets you create a query on top of an Excel sheet -- right in a tab within the same spreadsheet. So in my case, when I wanted to load the data into MxLoader / Maximo, I just hit the refresh button in my power query sheet. It re-queried (un-pivoted) the data from my data entry sheet on demand -- transforming it so that it was ready for MxLoader / Maximo.
Final Thoughts:
All of that might sound complicated, and I suppose it was a bit complicated to set that up initially. But once it was set up, it was a breeze. And it was way better than what we were doing before.
With that said, there might be other even easier ways to do it that we weren't aware of at the time (i.e. application import?). We didn't have much guidance in this area, so we did the best we could at the time.Feel free to share any tips/techniques you use.#AssetandFacilitiesManagement#Maximo