Winter Is Coming to Plant (IBM Maximo Version)

Today is the first day of winter (in the northern hemisphere) and it may be a nice time for children, but not for the maintenance managers. They are responsible not only for their everyday duties but also need to take care of the snow and ice removal from the roofs, pavements and roads. 

It will be good to know when it will be snowing and prepare accordingly. Today, when the climate is changing, it is hard to predict the weather, but there is a FREE solution for IBM Maximo Asset Management users, which can make their life easier.

It is a simple integration, which will create a Work Order for snow removal in the morning, when the snowfall is expected.

The integration is based on Zapier service (zapier.com.) Please create free account first.

You will then create so-called Zap—a procedure, which will do the trick.

Add a component called Weather by Zapier first, which is responsible for checking the weather based on your geographical coordinates. Forecast information contains among others the information about precipitation, which we will use later.

Next component is Filter by Zapier; it is required to filter out the days when it will snow (this will be our actual trigger to create the Work Order in Maximo). You will define the precipitation type and probability here.

Final element is Webhooks by Zapier, which will call the IBM Maximo REST API to create the Work Order record. It requires the URL of your server and information about location, WO description. 

NOTE: User ID and password is required in this URL for Zapier to log in to and execute this action. It is recommended, that you have a separate user for this purpose only with limited access to the system (make sure you have a spare license.)

This is it! After few minutes of configuration, your integration is ready. You can now wait for new Work Order for snow removal. To make it even more proactive, you can define Escalation to send email notification about new Work Order.

I hope, you will not get too many snow notifications this winter and I wish you all Merry Christmas!

Below you will find sample technical details to configure the integration. Please replace the bold text in the URL with your values.

Weather by Zapier

            Trigger: Today’s Forecast (7AM)

            Latitude

            Longitude

            Units: Celsius or Fahrenheit

Filter by Zapier

            Precip Type: snow

            Precip Probability: (Number) Greater than–for example 30 (%)

Webhooks by Zapier

            Method: POST

            URL: https://SERVER_URL/maxrest/rest/os/mxwo/?_lid=USERNAME&_lpwd =PASSWORD&description=Snow%20Removal&siteid=SITE&location=LOCATION&reportedby=USERNAME&worktype=WORKTYPE

            Payload Type: form

Basic Auth: USERNAME|PASSWORD