Category: Vietnam

After several years training Maximo end-users and
consultants, I believe there is a right way to learn Maximo and also there is a
wrong way to do it. Contrary to what many may think, to me, the wrong way to
learn Maximo is through the job. This can take a lot of time, several full
cycle green field projects for a consultant, or many months or years for
end-users. By the time the person understands the software, it is often too
late. For a consultant, it could mean many bad implementations or advice had
been given to the customers; for an end-user, it could mean a lot of bad data had
been entered into the system over time.

So what is the right way to learn Maximo? I believe it is
through intensive, comprehensive training right at the beginning when a
consultant starts the job; or for an end-user, it is before he/she starts to use
the system.

But, you may argue, “how can I learn all of those modules and
applications, trying to remember all the menus, buttons, text fields and check boxes
and not spend a huge amount of time on it? Eventually, I have project (for
consultants) or a ton of other daily work (for end-users) to do. I simply
cannot spend several months to learn everything about this software”. Well, I
didn’t say you have to spend months to learn Maximo. It only takes a few days
if you know how to do it in the most effective way.

From my experience, the most effective way would be a guided
training through the key concepts and trying to relate those concepts with real
world examples. In the case of training new consultants for our company, I
would give the guy a real world problem to solve by drawing a motorbike on a
whiteboard. I’ll have the guy to enter information of the motorbike into Maximo
including: the asset – the bike, then the components and sub components such as
the engine, the wheels etc. Then I’ll have him to enter spare-parts information
such as tire, bearing, seal by creating Item codes for them and linking those item codes to the related asset (bike). Balances of the items also need to be
managed in the Inventory app too. The motorbike needs to have an odometer where
the end-user can enter the number of kilometers the bike runs each day. From
that, I’ll ask the guy to enter a preventive maintenance plan to inspect, clean
and change oil the motorbike for every 1000 km it runs or for every 3 months whichever
comes first.

When the guys can carry out all of those activities in Maximo, I’ll
review and ask questions to verify his understanding of the concepts and make
sure that he understands almost all advanced functions related to each concept too.
For example, when creating a new Item record, I’ll ask what is LOT? When should
somebody want to manage an item using this feature? What is KIT? Give an
example of how it is used.  When the “Add
as spare-part” check-box is checked, how does it work in Maximo?

This exercise will
extend to covers all core modules including Asset, Planning, Preventive
Maintenance, Work Management, Inventory, Purchasing and Contract. Although it
sounds a lot, I have seen many people, who have no prior experience with asset
management software, managed to pick up all of the knowledge and able to answer
almost 90% of my advanced questions only after 4-5 days of self-training. Very
few people require more than 10 days to fully understand all Maximo key
concepts This amount of time already includes the time to read books and watch through the training video recordings I provided in this earlier posts.

For the end-users, they usually have to learn on one or two modules,
and only require practical experience in the main processes; it only takes one
or two days of intensive training to get deep understanding of the concepts and
able to use the software effectively without much problem.