Organizations and Sites

The definition of Maximo Organizations and Sites will be one of the most important design decisions you will make during a Maximo implementation. To make a good decision you need to consider your future use of Maximo. For example, if you have a multi-phase project with an integration to a finance system to be performed in a later phase you must take this into consideration during the first phase of the project. How you define Organizations and Sites will be one of the first decisions you will need to make. This blog is aimed to help you make the right choices.

Maximo is made up of approximately 1,000 tables. These tables reside at the System, Set, Org and Site level. There are two types of Sets; Item (materials, services, tools) and Company. A Maximo database can have multiple Organizations and each Organization can have multiple Sites. One Organization and one Site can be the perfect way of defining your Maximo database, it is certainly the simplest model to use.

A Maximo implementation has to have at least one Item Set and at least one Company Set, these are the only Set types. A Company or Item Set can be specific to one organization or it can service multiple Organizations.

The definition of Organizations and Sites provides Maximo with data separation and data sharing capabilities. Data separation is provided at the Site level. Data sharing is provided at the Org, Set or System level.  An Organization level table has an ORGID attribute. A Site level table has both ORGID and SITEID attributes. ORGID and SITEID attributes often appear in a tables' unique key.

There are a few points to consider in determining your definition of Organizations and Sites but there is one very important one and it is underlined above. One Sites' data is separate from another Site, think of this as islands with no bridges. Locations, Assets and Workorders are defined at the Site level. In Maximo you cannot:

• connect an asset to a location in another site,
• link one asset in one site to another asset in another site,
• create a work package that contains work orders from a different site

If you have defined your Organizations and Sites and you wish to do any of the three bullet points above then you have made a mistake in defining your Organizations and Sites !!