Our CTO Đorđe Milić won the Best Maximo MRO Spare Part Management award at MaximoWorld 2024, showcasing our commitment to excellence and innovation in AI-driven asset management.
We interviewed Tamara Mihić, our Human Resources Manager, to get an insider’s view of our hiring process. Tamara shared her insights on the interview process, offered valuable tips for prospective employees, and discussed the challenges she encounters in her daily work.
We spoke with Nataša, a Business Analyst, and Branislav, a Software Developer who work together on the project across a number of departments of our long-time client, an oil company. We were eager to learn about the projects they are working on and the status of their collaboration.
When it comes to large, enterprise-sized companies, proper asset management can potentially break or make certain business and operational decisions, and there is a myriad of processes that, when left unoptimized, could hurt even the largest organization’s bottom line.
That’s why asset-heavy companies must choose a comprehensive management system that can help them keep every business and operational aspect of their assets at an optimum level, allowing them to make smarter choices and level up their operations.
To help these companies keep their projects and processes streamlined, IBM launched the Maximo Asset Management platform back in 2005. Since then, Maximo has become one of the most renowned EAM, i.e. enterprise asset management software around the globe.
The IBM Maximo platform is widely used due to its flexibility and functionality. It’s an intuitive platform that’s widely regarded as one of the best for asset-sensitive companies across the board, more or less, regardless of the industry they’re in.
Still, to get the most out of the features that IBM Maximo offers, companies should ensure a detailed implementation plan. With sufficient project management support and MOC (Management of Change) processes in place, both the IT department and the organization’s decision-makers will have a well-structured plan to achieve success with the platform.
Implementation is a crucial area to focus on as it will play the most critical role in ensuring a good return on investment after deploying Maximo. Having an effective roll-out plan in place will also help to smooth out the entire optimization process, resulting in more streamlined data migration to the new system.
In this article, we’ll give a few tips on how to successfully implement Maximo to help you keep your teams productivity optimized during the implementation process and later on when you start to reap the benefits of this outstanding platform.
This might come off as a bit self-explanatory, but it’s still one of the most crucial steps during Maximo implementation. Since implementing the platform to meet your organization’s needs is one of the essential parts of Maximo’s deployment, it’s of utter importance to have the right team do the job. If you need it, you can always get help from external consultants who can significantly help you with the entire process of integrating Maximo. On the other hand, a cross-functional team implementation task force can go into much deeper detail when it comes to managing priorities. They can be more effective when it comes to assessing requirements, adjusting different project schedules, and handling any issues on the fly that may arise.
However, to make this happen, you should select a team that understands and really embraces all the value that IBM Maximo offers to your organization and fully understand all the challenges that come with such a large-scoped project.
Also, involving middle-management stakeholders and executives can also help to make the communication coordinated across the board involving all departments and organizational entities. Lastly, you should also select a competent individual to lead the team. A single-point person is always a must to ensure accountability and trackability. This team leader can cooperate with the rest of the team and the entire company to help define other crucial roles like approvers, reviewers, end-users, and so on.
When companies attempt to implement such comprehensive software packages without setting up their requirements first, they are more or less on a crash course to failure.
A good starting point would be to task out a review of the EAM platform. This likely means that you already have some of your requirements defined. After that, it’s imperative to crystalize those requirements and optimize the corresponding functions within Maximo to meet your specific needs.
This is an integral part since it can have a significant impact on the decisions you might make regarding future system integrations and extensions, especially with third-party solutions.
Also, you will want to review other functional areas such as:
• Currencies
• Inventory categories
• Accounting features
• Organizational structure
• Security features
• Permissions
• Site and company hierarchy
• Asset hierarchy
Because you will be reviewing inventory categories and asset hierarchy, you can also implement different facility asset management tags to help streamline data entry and help the ongoing documentation, which will be a huge help later on. When reviewing your essential requirements, it’s imperative to ensure that the IBM Maximo platform is correctly aligned with your internal processes and already integrated digital solutions.
More or less, every corporate IT architecture is comprised of a complex labyrinth of different software and hardware systems.
After installing Maximo, your next step should be initiating a detailed testing process to see whether the new platform is fully compatible with all of your systems. Maximo will generally interact with several different programs and will probably be running on other systems too.
The more testing you perform before the fully-fledged enterprise-wide roll-out, the more you’ll be able to reduce possible errors from occurring and different issues from arising when your end-users finally start working with the platform. Fully integrated software systems provide a much more streamlined onboarding experience right off the bat and can help end-users get used to the new environment much faster. This eliminates unnecessary stress and frustration, possibly promoting productivity and job satisfaction.
No matter how you plan to implement IBM Maximo, data migration is an essential part of the process. To make migrating data as painless as possible, it’s best you and your team do it as early as you can. When your assets are tagged appropriately, data entry can be performed with barcode scanners to make the entire process even faster.
Getting all the necessary data in the system will enable you to test backup features along with data retrieval functions. This can also help you prepare training materials for the people who will be working with the platform.
This is also an ideal time to let the system’s power users interact with the data so they can define the necessary parameters in regards to user acceptance destiny and other corporate procedures.
Setting up a short training schedule for your teams who will be using the platform can also go a long way in making the entire implementation more efficient and straightforward. Make sure to give them a specific amount of time during which they can familiarize themselves with the basic platform features and controls.
Furthermore, it’s also a great idea to have detailed user manuals at hand in case of any arising issues following the roll-out.
Even before the platform is officially launched in the company, you should already think about scheduling regular system audits. This makes it easier for the entire IT department to manage updates, system changes, additional patches, security updates, and more. Furthermore, regular reviews will also provide abundant opportunities for support and users to exchange experiences and to help each other identify any issues.
The IBM Maximo is undoubtedly one of the best EAM platforms enterprises can use to streamline their asset-sensitive processes. Still, in order to get out the best of what the platform has to offer, companies should have a proper implementation plan in place not just to roll out the new system fast but to reduce system downtime, which may also negatively impact productivity.
As such, this article can be helpful in establishing some ground rules regarding your implementation process and will help you get off the right foot with Maximo, one of the best EAM platforms currently out there.
