Unfortunately there is going to be a wide variety of opinions here, and I'm only speaking for myself. I think both the Inspections & Inventory work centers are usable in the current form and have some advantages over the legacy options.
In the case of Inspections, there is no legacy app, but the use case is compelling enough and the ability to choose what to show based on previous responses is significantly better than anything you could have done with Work Orders before. When they get to the point where you can have multiple answers for the same question (think check all that apply), this will be one of the best additions IBM has added since I've been working with Maximo in the last 10 years.
The biggest negative to Inspections right now is performance. The work centers in general download a significant amount of supporting resources and make thousands of HTTP requests, so there's a much more noticeable delay than using core applications. The SR work center takes about 30 seconds for first run (no cache), which is a poor experience when you have users who use it infrequently. We haven't thoroughly tested 7.6.1.2 yet to see what improvements exist in this release, but have a case open with IBM to try and improve the user experience inside the app.
Inventory (Manage Inventory) is another interesting improvement because it makes a lot more things actionable from the "list tab". With the new work center you can quickly perform counts (and now reconcile in the work center). You can quickly issue/transfer items. You can quickly see any reservations, use the new process for picking and staging (which is only in the work center), etc. It's a good example of rethinking the experience for inventory that enables users to be effective quicker than they could with the legacy UI.
The rest have core experiences that work better today IMO. For example, Work Execution doesn't work well for me because you can't easily add new fields (and almost all customers have custom fields on work orders that they need to capture). The idea of cards isn't an improvement to me over the textbox approach because it takes up significantly more space and is harder for me to remember where things are on the screen. I like the idea of a header bar (similar to what Control Desk has) to allow you to see key information at a glance such as status, priority, etc. but beyond that I'd prefer a standard form layout closer to what exists today in core. And once you can't do what you what you need to in this app, you have to navigate to the core application which is a very disjointed experience to have two extremely different UIs.
IBM is investing in work centers, and with the new designer they're working on with a new technology platform & UI design they could quickly change my opinion. If nothing else, I expect their coverage of legacy applications will increase significantly faster because they won't have to write nearly as much code to implement a new attribute like they have to today.
------------------------------
Steven Shull
Director of Development
Projetech Inc
Cincinnati OH
------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: Sat August 08, 2020 12:38 AM
From: User1971
Subject: Pros and Cons of Work Centers?
What are the pros and cons of Work Centers in 7.6.1.2?
Have Work Centers worked out well for you? Or are there still kinks to be worked out?
Possible pros:
Easier to use than Maximo Desktop?
Less is more?
Possible cons:
Too limited to be practical? (source)
UI performance issues?
Ideal connectivity required?
Difficult to customize?
#AssetandFacilitiesManagement
#Maximo