At TRIMax 2017 ValuD released its “Top 10 Tririga or Maximo Best Practices/Lessons Learned”. Based on positive response and participation by TRIRIGA/Maximo enthusiasts, we are initiating a blog series to help you define and map your Business processes to optimize your TRIRIGA or Maximo return on your investment. The series will provide guidelines to improve the performance and manage the lifecycle of your TRIRIGA/Maximo applications – addressing your real estate, facilities and asset management business needs.

A successful implementation of any application drives user adoption. Complex workflows, slow loading speeds and application operational issues can challenge your software implementation goals.

TRIRIGA and Maximo are No Exception.

At times, when mapping complex business processes in the midst of ever-changing trends and business needs, organizations follow a customization path. However, with more customizations, application upgrades become more time consuming and tedious with each new product release.

Simple configurations, like adding a field to a form that is in the OOTB business object (BO) or adding a new field to the TRIRIGA or Maximo OOTB business object can be replicated easily within the support lab environment. However when an organization starts adding business logic behind the forms, tabs or other associated fields, replicating the issues becomes more difficult for the product support team.

ValuD Lessons Learned

ValuD experts suggest that you “focus on out-of-the-box features, configure/customize only if a feature/process gap is strategically important. Adopt out-of-the-box best practices”.

Out-of-the-box features/functionalities come with the IBM product without the need of further configuration or modifications. These functionalities allow you to modify settings to reflect your business needs. After years of IBM’s extensive development, many value-add out-of-the-box functionalities often go undiscovered or unused.

Example:

The Work Planner feature in IBM TRIRIGA – allows supervisors/managers to efficiently allocate and assign service technicians to complete tasks on the desired schedule. A built-in graphical planner allows supervisors to assign work tasks, based on the technician’s availability. On-screen job planning is simple with drag and drop functionality. Though a useful OOTB functionality of IBM TRIRIGA, this functionality is often overlooked.

ValuD strongly recommends that you focus on pre-built capabilities of Maximo or TRIRIGA which align with your business needs or can address business pain points with minimal setup.

Put simply, adapt your business processes to TRIRIGA or Maximo, rather than customizing TRIRIGA or Maximo to fit your business processes. An example is when a customer changed their resource allocation methodology and started using Assignment Manager Module of Maximo instead of trying to replicate their custom application in Maximo using Java customization.

TRIRIGA and Maximo were designed with a thorough understanding of the diverse business processes, industry practices, and business pain points within real estate, facilities and asset management. Take advantage of a ready to use system that helps you manage your business effectively.

For example, lot of customer’s change the way they track lifecycle statuses and priorities of work orders in their process to match what is provided by OOB Maximo.

However, this isn’t to say that you should not have customizations.

If a particular feature or process gap is not available within the pre-built OOTB functionalities of IBM TRIRIGA/Maximo, configuration/customization could be strategically leveraged. Configuration/customization allows you to adjust the applications based on your legacy systems and processes, providing options to address your business specific workflows. Configurations can vary for a workflow or an object, from partial to complete in TRIRIGA and Maximo.

ValuD recommends using independent configurations, which are not dependent on internal structures. Customizations that involve altering the code of the base system can cause problems during application upgrades, where new functionalities may not be supported or compatible with new product releases. Keep in mind that customization may carry risk and may prove costly to maintain.

ValuD encourages use of Automation scripts instead of Java customization. These scripts increase productivity by simplifying repetitive tasks, avoid loss of class on Maximo upgrades, and allow execution of scripts without having to recompile Java files or restart the server.

ValuD has extensive experience of working with clients on their OOTB customization/configurations or independent business process customization/configurations needs. Significant investments over the past few years has resulted in ValuD developing module specific solution accelerators for both TRIRIGA and Maximo using our FastStart methodology.

To learn more about our readily available solution accelerators or to discuss your process requirements within TRIRIGA or Maximo, please contact us at [email protected].

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