What is business process optimisation in a Maximo context?

The work management, planning, inventory, reliability and PM process change that decides whether IBM Maximo drives operational behaviour or records it after the fact. It is organisational work with a configuration output, measured on a named cycle before and after.

How do you use ISO 55001 without turning it into a paperwork exercise?

As a test of traceability. ISO 55001 asks whether there is a line of sight from organisational objectives, through an asset management policy and its plans, to the decisions taken about individual assets, and whether that line is evidenced, reviewed and competently staffed. Applied to a PM programme it forces the question of why a given routine exists and who last reviewed it. Conformity itself is assessed by a certification body, not by us.

What if our own teams disagree about the process?

That is the usual starting position. Disagreements that are technical, such as two depots doing one thing differently, are settled on evidence. Disagreements about asset purpose need a decision from someone with the authority to take it, because configuring both versions leaves an estate with two processes and one report.

Do you do this without a Maximo programme running?

Yes. We are often asked to assess an existing work management or reliability process, name the changes that would improve the outcome, and either build them in your current Maximo or feed them into a planned upgrade.

Where does this sit against implementation or a MAS upgrade?

Usually alongside one. A mobile rollout makes the sequencing vivid: putting close-out on a phone exposes every ambiguity in the close-out process to two hundred technicians at once, so shortening the code list belongs before the rollout. See Maximo to MAS upgrade and implementation.

How do you measure whether it worked?

Against the baseline taken in the first assessment: schedule compliance on a frozen weekly baseline, planned to reactive ratio, jobs abandoned in the field, elapsed days from request to scheduled work, inventory turn and audit readiness. Each is reported from Maximo rather than from a spreadsheet.

Business process optimisation

Measure one cycle, then remove the step that fails it.

This page takes a single named process, the weekly planning cycle on a two-depot water network, and shows it before and after: the elapsed days, the work order record field by field, where a planner week goes, and the one reordering that stops crews travelling to jobs that were never possible that day. Senior asset management practitioners run this work, and the output is configured in your IBM Maximo or MAS estate.

Talk about process work Meet the practitioners

The cycle, before and after

Three measures on one planning cycle

4 days
From request raised to work scheduled: 84%
Schedule compliance against a frozen weekly baseline: 1
Jobs a week abandoned in the field for missing parts or permits

One record, dissected

The same work order, on the old cycle and the new one

A planned seal replacement at Depot B. Six fields carry the process change and two deliberately do not, because the labour hours and the asset are the same on either cycle.

WO-118472, seal replacement, pump PU-4021

6 of 8 fields changed

Field	Before	After	Set by
PRIORITY	3, taken from the wording of the request	1, derived from asset criticality	Planner with the reliability engineer, Monday triage
MATERIALSTATUS	Checked after the job was scheduled	RESERVED before the job could be scheduled	Storekeeper, Tuesday, against the reservation
PERMITREF	Raised on the morning of the work	PTW-4471, held before the week was accepted	Supervisor, Tuesday
SCHEDSTART	Moved twice during the week	Set once the supervisor accepted the job	Supervisor, Wednesday scheduling meeting
FAILURECODE	Blank, or the nearest of two hundred codes	BEARING-WEAR, from a list of nine	Technician, at the asset, at close-out
DEFERRALREASON	Not captured	Recorded on each job that did not run	Planner, Friday review
ACTLABHRS	3.5	3.5	Unchanged. A seal replacement takes what it takes.
ASSETNUM	PU-4021	PU-4021	Unchanged

One record from an illustrative cycle, used to make the mechanism followable.

Where the effort goes

A planner week, before the reordering

The planner is not short of capability. Two thirds of the week is spent on work that exists because the order of the cycle is wrong, and most of that work has no owner at all.

Share of a planner week of 37.5 hours, before the change

Planning and estimating new work

32%

Decided today by: The planner
Chasing parts and permits for work already scheduled

22%

Decided today by: Nobody in particular
Re-triaging backlog that was triaged the Monday before

18%

Decided today by: Whoever asked most recently
Re-planning jobs that moved mid-week

16%

Decided today by: The breakdown that arrived first
Chasing close-out detail from crews

12%

Decided today by: The reliability engineer, by request

Sixty eight per cent of the week goes on chasing, re-triaging and re-planning. One reordering, made on a Tuesday, takes most of it out.

Shares are an illustrative composite from planner time on asset-intensive estates, not a measurement of your operation.

The decision that removed a step

Parts and permits are checked before a job may be scheduled, rather than after it has failed in the field.

Two jobs a week now leave the window on Tuesday with the constraint named on each, instead of being scheduled, travelled to and abandoned on Thursday. That removes the second scheduling meeting, the one that re-plans what the first one planned, and it is a change of sequence rather than of software. It is also the change everything else in the week depends on: without it, Wednesday cannot produce a baseline anyone will honour.

The cycle as it runs now

Five hand-offs, Monday to Friday

Each hand-off names the person on both sides of it and the time it takes. The frozen baseline on Wednesday is what makes Friday measurable, and the Friday review is what stops the whole cycle reverting.

01

Monday, 60 minutes: the backlog is triaged against criticality

Forty one new requests. The planner and the reliability engineer set a work type and a criticality-derived priority on each, and park nine explicitly with the reason on the record, so the same nine are not re-triaged next Monday.
02

Tuesday, before any scheduling: parts and permits are checked

Thirty four candidate jobs go to the storekeeper. Thirty two come back with parts reserved. Two move out of the window with the constraint named: a seal kit held two hundred miles away, and a permit that needs a fortnight of notice.
03

Wednesday, 25 minutes: the schedule becomes a commitment

Supervisors accept thirty two jobs crew by crew and decline two on capacity, which is a legitimate answer and now a recorded one. The accepted week is frozen as a baseline, so a later change carries a reason.
04

Thursday, at the asset: close-out answers the reliability question

A crew finds bearing wear rather than seal failure. Close-out takes a failure mode from the nine-code list the reliability engineer designed, and flags the job plan as wrong for that asset class. On a Maximo Mobile rollout the same close-out is made at the asset rather than typed up two days later.
05

Friday, 45 minutes: the review works the six misses

Twenty six of thirty two done. Three lost to a breakdown, two to weather, one to a job plan wrong for that asset class. The first five are the operation being an operation. The sixth goes to the job plan owner with a date and is built under Maximo configuration.

Where this has been done

Two process programmes with a configuration output

North Sea oil and gas operator

Oil and gas

Situation

Failure and safety-critical element data could not answer the questions reliability and HSE engineers were asking of it.

What changed

An ISO 14224, API RP 14C and ISO 15926 aligned data standard defined and embedded inside Maximo rather than alongside it, so close-out feeds the same standards the regulator and partners use.
Read the case study →
UK ferry operator

Maritime

Situation

An inventory and procurement process carried into a Maximo 7.6 to IBM MAS 9.0 upgrade against a hard regulatory deadline.

What changed

Stock policy and the purchase to receipt sequence reworked as part of the upgrade, with purchase orders and goods receipts crossing to Dynamics 365 on a written contract.
Read the case study →

Both are published case studies. Neither is the illustrative cycle used above.

Conditions on this work

Three conditions that decide whether to commission this

All three are about your organisation rather than our method, and all three are settleable in the first ninety minutes.

A contested decision goes to the person entitled to take it

Most of what we find is a disagreement rather than a defect: operations and maintenance holding different views of what an asset is for, or two depots that solved one problem twice. Configuration encodes a decision once it exists, so we put the choice and its consequences to the owner and hold the platform work behind it.

Your planners, supervisors and storekeepers build the redesign

The sequence above was designed by the people who work it, which takes real hours from busy operational staff and a sponsor who will hold a decision when a depot pushes back. Where those two commitments are unavailable, we say the work is not ready to start.

The committed measures are the ones your data can back

Schedule compliance, planned to reactive ratio, inventory turn and audit readiness are measurable on most estates from the first cycle. Mean time between failure becomes measurable once failure coding is fixed and a year of clean history exists, so we name it as a later measure and commit to the rest now.

Process optimisation, frequently asked questions

What is business process optimisation in a Maximo context?: The work management, planning, inventory, reliability and PM process change that decides whether IBM Maximo drives operational behaviour or records it after the fact. It is organisational work with a configuration output, measured on a named cycle before and after.
How do you use ISO 55001 without turning it into a paperwork exercise?: As a test of traceability. ISO 55001 asks whether there is a line of sight from organisational objectives, through an asset management policy and its plans, to the decisions taken about individual assets, and whether that line is evidenced, reviewed and competently staffed. Applied to a PM programme it forces the question of why a given routine exists and who last reviewed it. Conformity itself is assessed by a certification body, not by us.
What if our own teams disagree about the process?: That is the usual starting position. Disagreements that are technical, such as two depots doing one thing differently, are settled on evidence. Disagreements about asset purpose need a decision from someone with the authority to take it, because configuring both versions leaves an estate with two processes and one report.
Do you do this without a Maximo programme running?: Yes. We are often asked to assess an existing work management or reliability process, name the changes that would improve the outcome, and either build them in your current Maximo or feed them into a planned upgrade.
Where does this sit against implementation or a MAS upgrade?: Usually alongside one. A mobile rollout makes the sequencing vivid: putting close-out on a phone exposes every ambiguity in the close-out process to two hundred technicians at once, so shortening the code list belongs before the rollout. See Maximo to MAS upgrade and implementation.
How do you measure whether it worked?: Against the baseline taken in the first assessment: schedule compliance on a frozen weekly baseline, planned to reactive ratio, jobs abandoned in the field, elapsed days from request to scheduled work, inventory turn and audit readiness. Each is reported from Maximo rather than from a spreadsheet.

Bring last week's schedule and the work that actually ran.

Not a process map. The jobs you planned for one real week, the jobs that were done, and the reasons the rest were not. In ninety minutes we separate the misses that are the operation being an operation from the ones that are a process defect with an owner.

What to bring to the first call

Last week schedule and the completed list beside it, however messy
The reasons the unexecuted jobs did not happen, in the words the supervisor used
Your close-out screen, and the failure code list a technician chooses from
The measure your board currently sees, and whether the operation believes it
The name of the person who can settle a disagreement between two depots