Maximo Consultant

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.

Maximo EAM is a comprehensive software for Oil & Gas operators to manage and control all types of their assets including equipment, infrastructure, facility and inventory. The system however does not include the accounting and finance functionalities. The O&G operators that successfully implemented Maximo system often find themselves having two software systems that do not talk to each other. The accountants at these companies have to manually process and post invoices and other financial transactions manually. This process is time consuming, error prone and often lack of transparency.

Cataloguing Item Master data in Maximo with eCAT add-on

A quick demo on how to catalog a spare-part record in Maximo using eCAT add-on.

Demo eLogBook mobile application

A quick demo for Avenue eLogBook mobile application on an ECOM Smart-Ex device. The video is delivered in Vietnamese and I've added caption in English for the English speaker audience.

Automation Scripting Tutorial

Got a request from someone overseas to teach him on configuring automation script in Maximo. All of my previous tutorials posted have been in Vietnamese.

I have always wanted to do this but haven't found the time. So here it is, the first one in English.

Enable sysadmin and demo users to access Oracle e-business Suite 12.2.6 VM

As my teams have to involve in some Maximo - Oracle EBS integration projects, I decided to download the latest Oracle EBS demo VM to learn a bit more about the system. Downloading and deploying the environment from edelivery.oracle.com is straight forward.

The good thing about Oracle EBS 12.2.5 or later is that Oracle team decided to install everything in

only one VM box. As such, the download file size is very small, only 60GB. And after deployment, the VM only takes 300GB (much smaller compared to 700-800GB in previous version). The VM only requires 8GB RAM, thus, it fits very well into my laptop with 16GB RAM and 1TB HDD. I still can run one Maximo environment to try out some integration code if necessary.

One difficulty I got after deploying EBS is I couldn't login using the standard SYSADMIN/welcome username and password. EBS kept returning a "failed to login" error message. After some investigation, I found out that I have to go into /u01/install/APPS/scripts and run the enableDEMOusers.sh and enableSYSADMIN.sh scripts in order to login.

Will post updates of my progresses learning about EBS and integration in the future.