Maximo Open Forum

Maximo Inspections (Work Center) have been out for a while now and I wondered how folks are handling the reporting of the completed results? I know you can see them in the work center, and get to that via the work order as well as other places. However, that is a slow and inefficient way to do it. There is no option from there to save (or print) the inspection result except for standard browser controls. Some customers are asking for all inspection results to be automatically saved to PDF and stored.

Is anyone using BIRT or Cognos to report on inspection results? What about external reporting tools? 

Is there a way to take into account the dynamic nature of the inspections? By this I mean is it possible to create a report that will only render the fields that were populated, ignoring any blanks through being optional or not used in the conditional responses feature? Also, is it possible to create a report that can be used for multiple inspections by, I assume, identifying the Inspection Result ID and then dynamically rendering the INSPQUESTION and INSPFIELD attributes that have data in them.

I may be asking for too much but the alternative is to have a 1:1 relationship between reports and Inspections (could be hundreds in time), and a need to modify both whenever the Inspection changes. Plus, any inspection that makes heavy use of the optional and conditional responses features would contain a lot of blanks.  

Any and all discussion on the subject welcomed!
#Reporting
#WorkCenters
#WorkManagement

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Graham Drinkwater
Vetasi
------------------------------

From what I understand about the development cycle from IBM is they are concentrating on the configuration tool for work centers, then on a reporting tool for Work Centers. I use Inspections currently as a repository for auditing only. I haven't found any way to output any data gathered within the inspection.

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Gina Leonard
Aquitas Solutions
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Original Message:
Sent: 10-29-2020 09:18
From: Graham Drinkwater
Subject: Reporting for Maximo Inspections

Maximo Inspections (Work Center) have been out for a while now and I wondered how folks are handling the reporting of the completed results? I know you can see them in the work center, and get to that via the work order as well as other places. However, that is a slow and inefficient way to do it. There is no option from there to save (or print) the inspection result except for standard browser controls. Some customers are asking for all inspection results to be automatically saved to PDF and stored.

Is anyone using BIRT or Cognos to report on inspection results? What about external reporting tools? 

Is there a way to take into account the dynamic nature of the inspections? By this I mean is it possible to create a report that will only render the fields that were populated, ignoring any blanks through being optional or not used in the conditional responses feature? Also, is it possible to create a report that can be used for multiple inspections by, I assume, identifying the Inspection Result ID and then dynamically rendering the INSPQUESTION and INSPFIELD attributes that have data in them.

I may be asking for too much but the alternative is to have a 1:1 relationship between reports and Inspections (could be hundreds in time), and a need to modify both whenever the Inspection changes. Plus, any inspection that makes heavy use of the optional and conditional responses features would contain a lot of blanks.  

Any and all discussion on the subject welcomed!
#Reporting
#WorkCenters
#WorkManagement

------------------------------
Graham Drinkwater
Vetasi
------------------------------

We have a customer that primarily uses inspections with Work Orders so they utilize a couple of BIRT reports that you run from the WO. As you mention, inspections are pretty dynamic but it's not too bad to display each of the questions (what the question is, what the response was, etc.). In their use case they didn't hide questions that weren't provided but that shouldn't be too difficult by conditionally showing/hiding the row when a value isn't provided.

The one neat thing that we did that was a little bit above and beyond was display uploaded images in the report when they exist. Since these images are attachments (not IMGLIB), there isn't a supported way in the BIRT framework. We ended up making REST API calls inside of the BIRT report to retrieve the images and then resized the images to avoid extremely large reports (some of the photos are almost 3 MB in size). We setup a special user account group to minimize the permissions and stored the API key outside of the report to avoid embedding it in the report.

If your inspections aren't typically tied to a WO, I'd suggest creating a basic app against inspectionresult (ensuring everything is read-only) so that your users could report against it with BIRT from there. I'm extremely against Cognos in general for detail based reports like I think you'd want with inspections. I don't think there's any good aggregates you could really get from inspections and that's where tools like Cognos/Power BI shines to me. Of course if you're using Crystal or some other reporting framework like that, you'll be fine as well.

------------------------------
Steven Shull
Projetech
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 10-29-2020 09:18
From: Graham Drinkwater
Subject: Reporting for Maximo Inspections

Maximo Inspections (Work Center) have been out for a while now and I wondered how folks are handling the reporting of the completed results? I know you can see them in the work center, and get to that via the work order as well as other places. However, that is a slow and inefficient way to do it. There is no option from there to save (or print) the inspection result except for standard browser controls. Some customers are asking for all inspection results to be automatically saved to PDF and stored.

Is anyone using BIRT or Cognos to report on inspection results? What about external reporting tools? 

Is there a way to take into account the dynamic nature of the inspections? By this I mean is it possible to create a report that will only render the fields that were populated, ignoring any blanks through being optional or not used in the conditional responses feature? Also, is it possible to create a report that can be used for multiple inspections by, I assume, identifying the Inspection Result ID and then dynamically rendering the INSPQUESTION and INSPFIELD attributes that have data in them.

I may be asking for too much but the alternative is to have a 1:1 relationship between reports and Inspections (could be hundreds in time), and a need to modify both whenever the Inspection changes. Plus, any inspection that makes heavy use of the optional and conditional responses features would contain a lot of blanks.  

Any and all discussion on the subject welcomed!
#Reporting
#WorkCenters
#WorkManagement

------------------------------
Graham Drinkwater
Vetasi
------------------------------

Thanks Steven! Your answer is always very helpful.

We are in difficulty with the attached pictures/images attached to an inspection result BIRT report as well.

Can you please explain a bit on how did you make a REST API calls inside of the BIRT report to retrieve the images?

Actually we planned to just simply print out the inspection result to PDF or paper originally and we found that with any major browsers, it even can't be printed out for the whole web pages, no matter saved them to a complete MHTML file. Once it's opened with any browser, we can only print one page on screen... Don't know if you also experienced that as well.

Thanks very much,

Frank Meng

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Frank Meng
City of Oshawa
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 10-30-2020 09:29
From: Steven Shull
Subject: Reporting for Maximo Inspections

We have a customer that primarily uses inspections with Work Orders so they utilize a couple of BIRT reports that you run from the WO. As you mention, inspections are pretty dynamic but it's not too bad to display each of the questions (what the question is, what the response was, etc.). In their use case they didn't hide questions that weren't provided but that shouldn't be too difficult by conditionally showing/hiding the row when a value isn't provided.

The one neat thing that we did that was a little bit above and beyond was display uploaded images in the report when they exist. Since these images are attachments (not IMGLIB), there isn't a supported way in the BIRT framework. We ended up making REST API calls inside of the BIRT report to retrieve the images and then resized the images to avoid extremely large reports (some of the photos are almost 3 MB in size). We setup a special user account group to minimize the permissions and stored the API key outside of the report to avoid embedding it in the report.

If your inspections aren't typically tied to a WO, I'd suggest creating a basic app against inspectionresult (ensuring everything is read-only) so that your users could report against it with BIRT from there. I'm extremely against Cognos in general for detail based reports like I think you'd want with inspections. I don't think there's any good aggregates you could really get from inspections and that's where tools like Cognos/Power BI shines to me. Of course if you're using Crystal or some other reporting framework like that, you'll be fine as well.

------------------------------
Steven Shull
Projetech

Original Message:
Sent: 10-29-2020 09:18
From: Graham Drinkwater
Subject: Reporting for Maximo Inspections

Maximo Inspections (Work Center) have been out for a while now and I wondered how folks are handling the reporting of the completed results? I know you can see them in the work center, and get to that via the work order as well as other places. However, that is a slow and inefficient way to do it. There is no option from there to save (or print) the inspection result except for standard browser controls. Some customers are asking for all inspection results to be automatically saved to PDF and stored.

Is anyone using BIRT or Cognos to report on inspection results? What about external reporting tools? 

Is there a way to take into account the dynamic nature of the inspections? By this I mean is it possible to create a report that will only render the fields that were populated, ignoring any blanks through being optional or not used in the conditional responses feature? Also, is it possible to create a report that can be used for multiple inspections by, I assume, identifying the Inspection Result ID and then dynamically rendering the INSPQUESTION and INSPFIELD attributes that have data in them.

I may be asking for too much but the alternative is to have a 1:1 relationship between reports and Inspections (could be hundreds in time), and a need to modify both whenever the Inspection changes. Plus, any inspection that makes heavy use of the optional and conditional responses features would contain a lot of blanks.  

Any and all discussion on the subject welcomed!
#Reporting
#WorkCenters
#WorkManagement

------------------------------
Graham Drinkwater
Vetasi
------------------------------

Check out the MaxTECH presentation on Inspections.  Stephen Hume has implemented many clever configurations to report on Inspection results.

https://www.bpdzenith.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/MaxTECH-Maximo-Inspections-Deep-Dive.pdf

------------------------------
Lacey Lurges
IBM
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 10-29-2020 09:18
From: Graham Drinkwater
Subject: Reporting for Maximo Inspections

Maximo Inspections (Work Center) have been out for a while now and I wondered how folks are handling the reporting of the completed results? I know you can see them in the work center, and get to that via the work order as well as other places. However, that is a slow and inefficient way to do it. There is no option from there to save (or print) the inspection result except for standard browser controls. Some customers are asking for all inspection results to be automatically saved to PDF and stored.

Is anyone using BIRT or Cognos to report on inspection results? What about external reporting tools? 

Is there a way to take into account the dynamic nature of the inspections? By this I mean is it possible to create a report that will only render the fields that were populated, ignoring any blanks through being optional or not used in the conditional responses feature? Also, is it possible to create a report that can be used for multiple inspections by, I assume, identifying the Inspection Result ID and then dynamically rendering the INSPQUESTION and INSPFIELD attributes that have data in them.

I may be asking for too much but the alternative is to have a 1:1 relationship between reports and Inspections (could be hundreds in time), and a need to modify both whenever the Inspection changes. Plus, any inspection that makes heavy use of the optional and conditional responses features would contain a lot of blanks.  

Any and all discussion on the subject welcomed!
#Reporting
#WorkCenters
#WorkManagement

------------------------------
Graham Drinkwater
Vetasi
------------------------------

Hi Graham,
I am currently working on a project where we are retrieving Inspection field, question and result to create a report in BIRT.  BIRT also has a visibility property that can be used on the table to suppress blank answers to questions. The visibility property also allows for any kind of a conditional statement to be built and applied to a data element.

------------------------------
NORMA RAMEY
Cohesive Solutions
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 10-29-2020 09:18
From: Graham Drinkwater
Subject: Reporting for Maximo Inspections

Maximo Inspections (Work Center) have been out for a while now and I wondered how folks are handling the reporting of the completed results? I know you can see them in the work center, and get to that via the work order as well as other places. However, that is a slow and inefficient way to do it. There is no option from there to save (or print) the inspection result except for standard browser controls. Some customers are asking for all inspection results to be automatically saved to PDF and stored.

Is anyone using BIRT or Cognos to report on inspection results? What about external reporting tools? 

Is there a way to take into account the dynamic nature of the inspections? By this I mean is it possible to create a report that will only render the fields that were populated, ignoring any blanks through being optional or not used in the conditional responses feature? Also, is it possible to create a report that can be used for multiple inspections by, I assume, identifying the Inspection Result ID and then dynamically rendering the INSPQUESTION and INSPFIELD attributes that have data in them.

I may be asking for too much but the alternative is to have a 1:1 relationship between reports and Inspections (could be hundreds in time), and a need to modify both whenever the Inspection changes. Plus, any inspection that makes heavy use of the optional and conditional responses features would contain a lot of blanks.  

Any and all discussion on the subject welcomed!
#Reporting
#WorkCenters
#WorkManagement

------------------------------
Graham Drinkwater
Vetasi
------------------------------

Thanks for the responses everyone, it sounds like I am not alone in thinking this is an area that has not been fully addressed yet but may be soon. A few follow on points:

• I am guessing it is relatively easy (for a report writer) to create a report that outputs results based on an inspection where 'Inspection ABC' maps to 'Report on Inspection ABC' and especially where the questions/responses are not conditional. So for each inspection form there would be a corresponding report. The problem with this is that it would be a huge effort to create the reports and then maintain them as the inspection forms are revised.
• It would be good if IBM switched to IMGLIB instead of attachments for the photos, or at least offered it as an option when creating the form. Thanks for the tip there Steven.
• Stephen Hume's MaxTech presentation was excellent and I use it a lot as reference for both SQL queries when hunting out data and also to create a couple of simple Maximo applications to display details such as where inspections are associated with assets and locations.
• What I really want to be able to do is have a single BIRT report that would handle multiple inspection forms, including where conditional questions are used. Work Order information would be fixed as normal with fields mapping 1:1. However, the Inspections Result section would be dynamic so that it would display the corresponding information where the appropriate INSPFIELDRESULT object is populated. For work order 1234 that might be 10 questions/answers that are all Yes/No. But work order 1235 might have 20 questions/answers that are a combination of date, num, txt, etc. If conditional questions are used those numbers and firld types cold change from one work order to another. As a non-technical person that sounds somewhere between very hard and impossible! At the same time, when you view a completed inspection in the Conduct an Inspection Work Center that is essentially what you are getting.

------------------------------
Graham Drinkwater
Vetasi
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 10-29-2020 09:18
From: Graham Drinkwater
Subject: Reporting for Maximo Inspections

Maximo Inspections (Work Center) have been out for a while now and I wondered how folks are handling the reporting of the completed results? I know you can see them in the work center, and get to that via the work order as well as other places. However, that is a slow and inefficient way to do it. There is no option from there to save (or print) the inspection result except for standard browser controls. Some customers are asking for all inspection results to be automatically saved to PDF and stored.

Is anyone using BIRT or Cognos to report on inspection results? What about external reporting tools? 

Is there a way to take into account the dynamic nature of the inspections? By this I mean is it possible to create a report that will only render the fields that were populated, ignoring any blanks through being optional or not used in the conditional responses feature? Also, is it possible to create a report that can be used for multiple inspections by, I assume, identifying the Inspection Result ID and then dynamically rendering the INSPQUESTION and INSPFIELD attributes that have data in them.

I may be asking for too much but the alternative is to have a 1:1 relationship between reports and Inspections (could be hundreds in time), and a need to modify both whenever the Inspection changes. Plus, any inspection that makes heavy use of the optional and conditional responses features would contain a lot of blanks.  

Any and all discussion on the subject welcomed!
#Reporting
#WorkCenters
#WorkManagement

------------------------------
Graham Drinkwater
Vetasi
------------------------------