Implementation
Six things have to be true before a MAS go-live.
New IBM Maximo Application Suite programmes led by engineers and consultants who have run asset operations themselves. The rungs below are what the schedule actually turns on, and each one states what it costs to hold a date against it while it is still false.
The ladder
What has to be true, rung by rung
Read from the top. The lowest rung that is not yet true is where the programme will slip, whatever the plan says.
- Rung 6
One cohort live and measured before the next
- Requires
- A first site or discipline in production, with a measurement of whether work is being recorded where the design says it should be, taken before the second cohort starts.
- Skip it and
- Every site inherits the same defect on the same day, and hypercare turns into a rescue with the same people covering nine locations.
- Rung 5
A job that closes at the end of a shift
- Requires
- The mobile flow walked in poor signal, with gloves on, in the last ten minutes of a shift, by a crew rather than by a project team in a meeting room.
- Skip it and
- The job goes into a notebook and is typed up on Friday by somebody who was not there. The record is complete and nobody trusts it.
- Rung 4
Interface counterparts pinned in writing
- Requires
- A named counterpart owner, a change window and either a test endpoint or an agreed stub for every interface, recorded before the plan is baselined.
- Skip it and
- The ERP team releases quarterly and the GIS team is mid migration. The go-live date assumed a change window nobody had asked for, and neither team reports to the programme.
- Rung 3Where the date is usually set
Process decisions with an owner and a date
- Requires
- A decision register open from week one, and someone senior enough to overrule a site when two depots both defend their own practice.
- Skip it and
- Configuration is built ahead of the decision and rebuilt when it lands the other way. Configure both variants to avoid the argument and the estate carries two operating models, two sets of reports and one uncomfortable audit.
- Rung 2
A hierarchy derived from how work is dispatched
- Requires
- A structure built from the level crews are sent to and the level the business reports at, then tested by placing twelve months of real work orders into it before anything is configured.
- Skip it and
- Crews book time to a parent covering half a site. Eighteen months later the question of which pumps fail most has no answer, and restructuring a hierarchy that already carries history and cost is a programme in its own right.
- Rung 1
An asset register with one named owner
- Requires
- One person accountable for confirming that two records are the same physical item, and a profile of the register in numbers: rows, nulls, duplicates, orphans.
- Skip it and
- Everything migrates. On the first Monday a planner searches for a pump they have looked after for eleven years, gets four results, and goes back to the spreadsheet.
Scoping
What moves the cost and the duration
Five drivers, and the first outweighs the other four together.
Process decisions still open
Data readiness
Integration count and counterpart availability
Reach into the field
Licensing shape
Run this before the date is set
Five statements, answered about your own estate
Work down them and stop at the first one that is not true today.
- 1
One named person can confirm whether two asset records are the same physical item.
- 2
Your asset hierarchy was derived from how crews are dispatched and how the business reports.
- 3
Every process decision the design depends on has an owner and a date against it.
- 4
Every interface has a counterpart owner who has given you a change window in writing.
- 5
A crew has closed a job on the target mobile flow, in poor signal, at the end of a shift.
If you stopped early
The statement you stopped on is the rung the programme will slip against. Working on it now costs weeks; discovering it at UAT costs the date.
If every statement held
Configuration quality is then the thing that decides the outcome, which is the position every implementation is trying to reach and few reach by accident.
The shape of the engagement
What MaxIron commits to, and what it costs your side
- Day one
- A version-controlled baseline from MaxIron Blueprint
- Week one
- The decision register opens
- First go-live
- One site or one discipline
- Ours outright
- Design, build, integration, migration, test, cutover, support
- Credential
- IBM Gold Partner through IBM Partner Plus, company 8294
- Delivered in
- United Kingdom, Ireland, United States, Europe
Tailored to your operation rather than a template you have to live inside.
Every choice the design depends on, with a named owner and a date.
Measured before the second cohort starts.
A partner can be wholly accountable for all of it.
What this needed from the client
- A person with the authority to overrule a site, available for roughly two hours a fortnight.
- Supervisors released for training and testing, which comes out of operational hours.
- Your own people to confirm that a duplicate record is a duplicate.
- Change windows from the teams that own your ERP, finance and GIS systems.
Delivered
Two programmes, and what changed
-
UK building materials group
Building materials
Situation
One division running SAP for maintenance, with asset management fragmented across business units.
What changed
Onto IBM Maximo in eight months from mobilisation to go-live, including a SQL Server to IBM DB2 conversion and integration with group ERP and finance.
Read the case study → -
UK industrial joint venture
Industrial
Situation
A live Maximo environment inherited from an incumbent supplier, with no current record of what the platform was doing.
What changed
Service transition completed in two months, documentation captured, and the configuration issues that had accumulated where nobody was keeping track cleared.
Read the case study →
Boundaries
Three responsibilities that stay inside your organisation
A proposal that implies otherwise fails in month five.
Process disagreements are settled by your authority
Where two sites disagree, we bring the options, the consequences and the evidence, then escalate. If escalation goes nowhere, design waits. That work belongs in business process optimisation before it belongs in a delivery backlog.
Data readiness is measured before the plan is signed
We measure it before design closes, and where the register is far off, that changes the plan and the price. An implementation on an unusable asset register delivers a system of record nobody trusts, on time and on budget.
Suite applications are scoped against the data that feeds them
Health, Monitor, Predict and Visual Inspection are separately licensed and carry real prerequisites: clean asset data, sensors, or failure history. Where those are absent we call the application premature and leave it out of the proposal.
IBM Maximo implementation, frequently asked questions
- What decides whether a Maximo implementation succeeds?
- Four things, in this order: whether the asset data is good enough to plan work from, whether the process decisions have named owners, whether the teams who own your other systems can give you a test endpoint and a change window, and whether a crew can close a job at the end of a shift without a workaround. Configuration quality matters, and it is rarely what decides the outcome.
- How long does a MAS implementation take, and what drives the cost?
- Duration and cost follow the five drivers above, with open process decisions outweighing the rest. Module count is a poor predictor of either. Our Maximo implementation timeline guide sets out how the phases sequence.
- Who owns data readiness, us or you?
- The work can be ours, the ownership stays yours. We profile the register, quantify the gap, migrate samples and do the heavy lifting on cleansing and load, using MaxIron Data Loader where volume justifies it. Confirming that a duplicate is a duplicate, or that an asset is out of service, is a call for your people.
- What if our sites cannot agree on a single process?
- That is the finding, and we escalate it rather than configure both variants. We bring the options, the operational consequence of each, and evidence from your own work history. Somebody in your organisation with the authority to overrule a site makes the call, and it is recorded with their name and the date.
- Do you start from a blank configuration?
- No. MaxIron Blueprint installs a pre-configured, version-controlled baseline on day one, so early design effort goes to what is genuinely specific to your operation rather than to rebuilding standard capability.
- Which MAS applications do you implement, and do you work outside the UK?
- Manage and mobile patterns on every programme, then Monitor, Health, Predict and Visual Inspection where the data that feeds them exists. MaxIron delivers in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States and Europe as an IBM Maximo partner, IBM Gold Partner through IBM Partner Plus as company 8294.
Bring the process your two sites disagree about.
One real disagreement and one real data extract. We will show how the decision gets framed, who has to own it, and what it changes in the design. That predicts your implementation better than a module walkthrough.
Bring this to the first call
- An export of your asset register, however untidy, and roughly how many records you think are duplicates
- A month of real work orders, including the ones that were closed badly
- The one process your sites do differently and both defend
- The three reports your executive team asks for every month
- The name of the person who can overrule a site, and whether they are available for two hours a fortnight