DCMUG 2022: A Welcome Return with the Addition of Reliability Summit

Held this year on November 1^st, at the Westin Hotel in Alexandria, VA., it was great to finally reconnect with commercial and federal Maximo end-users local to the mid-Atlantic area.

https://www.trmnet.com/events/dcmug-2022-maximo-user-group-reliability-summit/

Our focus for this event was a departure from the usual series of Maximo-related presentations. This time, with the participation of IDCON INC, we were able to educate attendees on potential improvements in their maintenance and reliability activities. Our main goal was to help businesses understand that once you have the ‘People’ and ‘Processes’ elements of your maintenance strategy sorted out, you can turn your attention to tools such as Maximo AAM and MAS to support what the business needs to accomplish.

Christer Idhammar, the Founder of IDCON, kicked us off with his perspective on where work management processes fail and how they can be improved… simply. His many years of experience have taught him that simple solutions have the longest lives and mitigate against any fads that pop up along the way. While there can be good things that come along like TPM, RCM, etc. the key is implementing simple and common-sense solutions that stick and have a long-term positive impact.

Tor Idhammar then took the attendees through key areas of any work management and planning processes that should be looked at for improvement. All work has a typical flow to it from identification, through planning and execution, and finally closure. Yet there are steps along the way that must occur in an intentional order… the unbroken chain if you will. At the end of Tor’s presentation, I demonstrated the various elements within MAS Manage that supported what Tor discussed right out of the box. While some of what I showed might have been a review for the group of very experienced Maximo users, however, the response was very positive because we used MAS Manage.

After lunch Owe Forsberg talked about making decisions in light of your Preventive Maintenance approach, seeking opportunities to reduce complexity and increase the value you get out of your efforts. One area to consider is that rather than relying fully on Maintenance to discover issues, Operators perform inspection rounds, capturing conditions and meter readings as they go. Given a tool like Maximo, those updated meter readings can be used to prompt the system to kick out work orders and other notifications if the readings are outside of pre-set limits. My part was to then demonstrate the TRM’s ACE App, where TRM has taken the library of IDCON Condition Maintenance Standards (CMS) and pre-loaded a library of Inspection Forms to be used by Operators as they conduct their rounds.

Our final presentation for the day was by IBM’s Dave Gasdia who is the program manager for Maximo. He walked us through the most current Roadmap for MAS. It was nice to hear directly from a person like David about where IBM is headed. The biggest takeaway from his presentation was how quickly IBM is developing upon the foundation that MAS has provided them. MAS is far beyond the functionality we have had in Maximo.

Unlike your typical conference, this one-day format gives you just enough information to go back to the shop and digest. Sometimes I find that after a couple of days of attending sessions they all begin to blend and my notes contain way too many “good ideas,” to implement. Kudos to TRM for putting on a practical event like this!

On that note, I’d like to conclude by thanking our sponsors IDCON INC, TD SYNNEX, and InterPro Solutions. We couldn’t have had a successful event without their support! And I’m looking forward to next year already.

Were you unable to attend or would you like to refer to the content presented? Reach out to us at AskTRM@trmnet.com to request copies of the session presentations.

John Q. Todd, Sr. Business Consultant / Product Researcher at TRM. Reach out to us at AskTRM@trmnet.com if you have any questions or would like to discuss deploying MAS 8, Maximo AAM, or TRM’s ACE App for condition-based maintenance/monitoring.