Maximo's ABC Analysis and Physical Count

A friend recently asked me on LinkedIn about Inventory ABC analysis on Maximo and how to setup physical cycle count. After responding to him, I thought it could be posted on this blog to share with other Maximo users who like to know more about this function.

First page of the ABC Analysis Report

ABC Analysis is the method of categorizing inventory items into three groups: fast moving, average, and low moving. This method is commonly used in ERP systems like SAP or Oracle.

Maximo with Oracle’s InMemory (Part 2) – Huge Performance Gain

Last week, I played around with Oracle’s new toy: the InMemory feature available in Enterprise Edition. Although it made Maximo runs 1.25x faster, but it didn’t meet my expectation which was from 2x to 5x. This has bothered me for the whole week and I kept thinking about it.

If you’ve read my previous blog post, the one thing I pointed out which could lead to no performance improvement is that I ran the test on a tiny demo version. It has only a few hundred assets and less than a thousand work orders. So, any heavy processes or poorly written queries couldn’t make the database 1 second slower. This week, I set out to do a more elaborate test with a setting that looks more similar to a real production environment.

Test Oracle InMemory Database with Maximo

For the last few years, SAP has been pushing hard on its HANA InMemory data platform and everybody talks about it. For me it makes sense because SAP’s ERP is such a huge system usually used by super large enterprises and is both a data intensive and mission critical system.

Maximo on the other hand is usually much less data intensive and for most clients I work with in Vietnam, they have small systems with databases of less than 10-20GB. Thus, I believe InMemory database is not a big deal for Maximo users. As I recently moved to Australia and got a chance to work with a much bigger client. Their Maximo runs on a cluster of more than two dozen JVMs yet somehow is still a bit slow considering the number of active users that they have. I suspect (since I don’t have visibility to their DB server) the bottle neck is the database in this case. Besides from the standard suggestions of looking at disk storage/SAN, network, memory allocation etc., I also mentioned they can consider implementing InMemory. Then I realized I never seen it implemented with Maximo, it would be a huge embarrassment if they look at it and find out that it doesn’t work.

This week I have some free time, so I decided to play around with InMemory database for Maximo to (1) confirm if it is possible and (2) see if it gives any real performance gain for Maximo.

Barcode/RFID Scanning for Maximo Everyplace

I’m in love with Maximo Everyplace. It is so simple and easy to use. And guess what, it is totally free now with Maximo 7.6.

Recently I worked with a client and while the team still discussing various options for mobility solutions, I quickly duplicated and produced an Everyplace mobile app on Test environment and demonstrate a smooth workflow with barcode scanning on my iPhone, all done within 15 minutes. I understand there are certain reasons for choosing a more complex online/offline, even native app solutions. However, since everyplace is so easy and cheap to implement, so why not have it as a backup solution just in case the more complex one doesn’t work. If you have experienced the use of such offline, installed app solution, you will know what I’m talking about. Things like app crashes or hang are quite common. Those things are usually quite difficult to support as the programmers, who for 99% of the time are present not onsite and do not have access to log files to see what happened to investigate and provide timely bug fix. In this case, for the end-users it is extremely frustrating as they cannot proceed with their work.

RFID/Barcode and Integrated Mobile Solutions for Maximo

      I had to look at RFID/Barcode options for Maximo mobility solution recently. Although these technologies have been around for decades and have become a commodity, when integrating with other systems like Maximo Anywhere or Everyplace, there are certain problems that we have to deal with. In this post, I’ll discuss a few concerns related to this topic, hopefully it helps Maximo consultants to save some time when considering the solution. These are just a brain dump of different things related to the topic that I have in mind. Thus, you can read them at any order or only look that the part that you are most interested in.

• Barcode vs QR code: When it comes to barcode reading, many people think that they can simply use the built-in camera of the phone or tablet to read barcode, as seen in many product comparing apps. However, in industrial setting, one should consider various extreme conditions that field workers have to work in. For example, in construction or in oil & gas, working at night is common. In such case, the camera doesn’t do well in reading barcode. In some of our tests, under pretty good ambient light, reading barcode takes up to 3-5 seconds while QR code reads almost instantly.