IBM Maximo Reviews

We have fully used Maximo for maintenance and inventory and purchasing management to manage cement factory operations and maintenance for more than 11 years. We have implemented Maximo at seven sites and are still adding sites. All our sites are hosted in one environment using multi-organization and multi-site configurations. We integrate Maximo with a financial system (Navision), and we built dashboards on top of the Maximo database using its business intelligence tool. We have upgraded Maximo twice: once from 6.4 to 7.5, and more recently, from 7.5 to 7.6.

It keeps the history of the transactions, so we can anticipate the asset behavior and costs in the future. It enables management to be able to tape the session.

Maximo has been suitable for businesses as it expands and shrinks according to market needs and operational conditions.

• The Preventive Maintenance feature, especially in its inspection routines and KPI abilities, is valuable.
• Work order management and scalability enables the businesses' needs to be met.
• Maximo is easy to learn.

The standard reports that shipped with the package need to be enriched with more advanced reports, especially for the Inventory Management sections.

Stability is good. We moved to the cloud with no issues.

Maximo's scalability enabled us to extend its usage from one site to be used in multiple sites with little configuration. This also enabled us to benchmark performance, manage inventory levels, inherit reports, and manage process and configuration on old and new sites.

I have my own in-house team who do technical support.

We did not use a solution prior to IBM Maximo.

The initial setup is easy, but I would recommend setting it up at a low level and maturing the solution over time.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Capabilities
• Support
• Reliability
• How will it help the organization's decision-making.
• Running costs and starting costs.

The main use is help desk. But we also use it for asset management, catalog offering, and CNDB.

It's much more reliable, it's much more configurable.

It's reliable, and it's all integrated in the same database.

It's actually a little too much for what we need. It could be good but there are too many conflicts and it's not user-friendly. It could use shortcuts for frequently requested services.

Other areas for improvement include:

• Enhanced Service Catalog on Mobile
• Agent intelligence
• Better dashboards for KPIs
• Full-service visibility - There are a lot of things that are hard for users to find out. For example, the Service Catalog is not too friendly. You really have to know what you're looking for.

It's quite reliable, but new versions often are not too stable. They bring in enhancements but they break other stuff. We're okay with it but it could be better.

Scalability is very good. It's easily scalable.

We have often set up PMRs and their support is quite good. We have issues that have reappeared in other releases, and things that aren't really supposed to be happening like that. We migrated to a different version, one thing was solved but then a new issue appeared, related to the same module. 

They give good service, but they could be a little more reliable in terms of solving defects and having it work as it should.

We used an old Lotus Notes solution that we implemented ourselves and then we migrated to Maximo. Now, our main client doesn't really like the way Maximo works, at least for them. So that's making us into a new solution.

In terms of selecting a vendor, I don't do the selection. I just evaluate the functional and technical aspects. Regarding pricing and things like that, I'm not the one that will decide. My main concern is that it does what it's supposed to do, does it well, and that the client likes it.

The initial setup was complex but that was 10 years ago. It might have changed since then.

The options we are now considering are JIRA and ServiceNow.

They have a preview site where you can log in as a user and try it for yourself. That is a really good way to get a feel for the solution; better than Youtube or whitepapers and things like that. You have a preview site, you log in, and you can try it.

I would give Maximo a seven out of 10 because it's good, but it's not too user-friendly, and some of the issues we have come across, the impact to us was a little too much to be coming from a big company such as IBM.

It is a software specialized in asset management, but nowadays, it is more than this.

With Maximo, we can manage, organize, and track incidents, claims, jobs, tasks, preventive and corrective maintenance, locations, and assets. Also, we can correlate all these items in order to obtain reports, such as how many incidents per locations, when was the last preventive maintenance in a location, who was the technician that did the job, or what was the spare part that he used, etc.

The main feature of Maximo is the capabilities of recording, tracking, and correlating. These are important items in the management of a company. These capabilities let us organize our work.

The mobile solution has a lot of room for improvement, especially in geopositioning capabilities, tracking capabilities, and configuration capabilities, in order to let the tech operate online and offline.

Maximo is very stable. We really do not have problem with stability.

We were able to scale perfectly.

Technical support is a seven on scale of one to 10.

We did not have a previous solution.

Maximo is a big system, so the initial setup is complex. I would recommend that you implement it in parts according with your most important processes.

Explore internal processes in order to evaluate the correct number of users in each Maximo module, then evaluate the different offers of pricing and licensing.

I did not participate in the evaluation.

My recommendations:

• Before starting, review your internal processes. It is a good opportunity to update them.
• Explore Maximo's add-ons. There are a lot specialized, different industries.
• Implement Maximo in parts.

When we integrated the Maximo DB with the BI tool, we were able to track and manage the inventory levels in much more controllable way, and reduced the inventory levels significantly within one year.

• Preventive maintenance management
• Maintenance management

1. Inventory management, especially:

• item cards – I need to be able to track item balance and history back to a given date
• inventory financial reports need a lot of enhancement
• consignment stock management has an issue – raised with the vendor
• reorder process and define reorder levels
• inventory lead time recommendation, according to transaction history

2. Purchasing management

• Vendor management needs enhancement

3. Maintenance KPIs like OOE , Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) need more enhancement

4. Operating budget management (recently added in version 7.6 ) but it is late in coming.

Sometimes I have had issues with with the web server which we use (IBM WebSphere) but we solved it.

No issues, this software is very efficient regarding scalability.

I would give it an eight out of 10.

The data gathering and data engineering were complex, but once they are done the remaining steps were straightforward.

The concurrent user license is much more effective in management and cost-wise, as it is more suitable for maintenance management.

I was not involved in this process at my current company.

1. Defining your business processes is vital for the success of this product.
2. End-user training should be implemented according to your processes.
3. Using Agile methodology fits well with this product, to ensure fast response to business changes.

We are able to organize, track, and report on all of the jobs/tasks/routine work/preventive maintenance that we perform daily, and report to management the status of these activities at any time.

The large range of configurability of the product is great, since everyone has a different way of doing things. I also like the interface mechanisms built into the tool. With these, we can talk to just about any external system.

Revision management of file attachments.

The product is very stable (when configured properly).

The product scales very very well.

Seven out of 10. There are lots of consultants and third-party developers that can help with this product. IBM is not the only choice.

(By the way, in my opinion nothing is perfect).

We used a home-grown solution. We wanted to take advantage of advances in technology without having to build out or enhance our home-grown solution, so we switched.

This depends the ROI you expect. I recommend you implement the most important functions and then add capabilities as you get more familiar with the product.

Explore the possibility of using DB2. You will avoid the cost of SQL Server or Oracle licenses.

MP2, SAP.

There are add-ons for calibration, scheduler, transportation, service provider, government, oil and gas, asset management configuration, and linear assets.

It is a very solid J2EE product with great middleware and webserver; scales very well, and can use one of three RDBMS systems.

Refine your maintenance processes, do not skimp on hardware.

Particularly related to compliance management, Maximo has been configured to provide a warning of compliance activities coming up and enables us to report on exceptions.

Maximo is a platform where apps can be created to support special processes. It is configurable, where you can add extra fields to screens and to the database.  

With that said, our biggest use of Maximo focuses on work and compliance management, and we have configured Maximo to help us manage our compliance activities. In addition, some pockets of the company utilize Maximo for managing work, failures, inventory, etc. beyond just compliance.

Although you can create notifications with Maximo, the configuration and options could be improved.

Overall, we have had no major stability issues with Maximo.

We do much of our support internally, but we have found that IBM technical support, when needed, has provided us with answers or identified whether the issue would be fixed in an upcoming patch.

Part of our company has used Maximo for about 20 years. The other part utilized Infor EAM but switched to Maximo due to more internal resources with Maximo experience, and because the Maximo implementation had been recently upgraded and improved.

Maximo is an enterprise system, so the initial setup is typically fairly complex.  You will want to include some consultant resource hours in the initial purchase of licenses to aid your IT staff in the initial installation, and to help make some of the hardware and software decisions.

Get an understanding of the intended usage at your company, and look at both the named user and concurrent-license pricing to make a determination which makes more sense for your usage.  Where available, concurrent licenses can be more cost efficient and provide more flexibility.

The original decision was many years ago, so the options were different then than they are today. About four years ago, we compared Infor EAM (which was previously implemented in another part of the company) to Maximo and decided to keep Maximo and convert Infor EAM users to Maximo.

I rate it a nine out of 10. If it's not the best EAM product, it is one of the best out there.

Make sure that you understand your work/asset management and other processes before trying to implement. Where possible, the product should be configured to fit within your processes, trying to avoid changes to the system that will make it hard to upgrade/update, as IBM provides frequent patches and updates.

• Ease of use
• The ability to configure and integrate it with other solutions for ERP.

It allows my clients to manage and maintain assets to save costs and keep safety a high priority while maximizing production time.

Industry specific solutions are always a game changer.

It gets more stable with every release.

Maximo is made to be a worldwide enterprise app and can scale easily.

IBM has great support.

No.

The initial setup was complex, because it is a complex product.

You pay for what you get. There are lots of options depending on how you would like to implement Maximo.

No.

Plan out the implementation and involve all levels from users to management. 

I have used versions 4 through the most current version 7.6, and it keeps getting better. I have been working with Maximo for twelve years. This is the Cadillac of asset management applications.