Interacting with Maximo via SMS

Voice call and SMS are being used as a user interaction interface in many systems and services provided by large organizations. However, in the past, this integration is quite complex and expensive, and thus, I never had a chance to play around with. Recently, I posted an article on how we can easily configure Maximo to send notification as SMS message. This is made easy and (free for developers) by using Twilio. 

Sending inbound command to a system from Twilio is more complex as it requires setting up of a Web Server and writing code to parse HTTP POST data and forward the message to an on-premise Maximo system. With App Connect, it becomes easy (and free for developers) to set up an API gateway on cloud and routing message to a system hosted in-house. So I decided to give it a try by imagine a two easy-to-achieve use cases as follow:

• Field workers sending a text message to Maximo to create a new Work Request, report Incident, or Defect. This could be useful to quickly register an action item without having a smart device or 3G connection. Below is a quick demo of this scenario:

• Approvers routing workflow by sending a simple text command. This could be useful for supervisors or managers who are always travelling or in meetings and don’t check email often. In the case when they are usually given a head-ups call, approving workflow is just a formality to keep record. With such scenarios, just reading the title of the request on text message will be enough for the approver to say Yes or No, this approach could greatly speed-up the approval process. Below is a quick demo for this use case:

There are many other use cases we can implement SMS, MMS, or Voice command to add value. I can quickly think of a few such as:

• Field workers sending an acknowledgement of new work order assignment and confirmation of  scheduled start time entered by planners
• Driver sending in telemetry data (fuel level, mileage etc.) or technician sending in asset’s meter data
• Workers updating actual labour hours to work orders.
• And whatever simple yet important data you can think of here

For the technical consultants who are interested in App Connect, the image below is how I integrated Twilio with Maximo via App Connect:

This may look a bit complex, but in fact, it is very simple. The whole process to set up App Connect and to hook up Twilio and Maximo takes less than 15 minutes. For Maximo on cloud, I guess we can configure Maximo to hook up with Twilio directly. But I don’t have access to a cloud Maximo environment which I can mess with. So perhaps that can be saved for a future article.