Does Your Organization Track Qualifications in Maximo?

What is a qualification in Maximo? Is there any validation against the planned work and labor to ensure the qualification is met? In previous versions of Maximo, qualifications had existed where an Organization would track the certifications and expiries of those certifications for their labor resources. Very few organizations in my experience used this as they typically had another system (typically a Learning Management System (LMS)) that did this. The challenge with this is that a Supervisor, Manager, Planner or Scheduler would have to reconcile what is in the LMS as it relates to the work that is in Maximo and being assigned to a Labor to ensure that the qualification is not only met but still valid which is time consuming, tedious and sometimes assumed that it is all good.

With MAS Manage V9, you will now see and have the ability to add one or more Qualifications to a Job Plan or Work Order at the header level and at each Task level and Labor. When added to the header this becomes your defined list that then restricts what can be applied to the Task and then later inherited to the Labor. You have the ability to define the exception type (Error, Warning, or Silent), which will then trigger during validation. IF Error is selected, the user will not be able to proceed until the appropriate Labor record with the correct qualifications is linked to the record. A Warning will provide the option to the user if they wish to proceed or change the labor to a possible better match and silent allows the user to continue. There are fields that have been added to the Work Order to view if the qualification is met or not. In addition to the fields for visibility, there is a Qualification history that can also be viewed. This is important as in many cases, new or expiring qualifications can be added, and the history will show you, based on the time the work was assigned.

This is a much-welcomed addition, and I personally feel that this closes the gap for organizations that need to plan and schedule work to the right resource with the right skill and having the appropriate qualifications.