Synchronizing your Locations between Maximo and GIS is a common task. GIS in many cases is the source of truth for Location records and may already contain hierarchy information. To avoid duplication of work, consider building that hierarchy at the same time you load your locations into Maximo.
What is a location hierarchy, you ask?
A simple example of a location hierarchy could be seen in the image below.
Using Canada, and for simplicity’s sake, I’ve reduced the number of provinces in the image. The Canadian federation could be broken down into its provinces, and then into the major cities of that province, as seen in the image. However, it could get even more complicated by listing each municipal region within the province, and then further break this down by City, then town, then to electoral regions. A detailed hierarchy like this could span down to 6, or 7 levels.
To translate this into business language, you may have a building location, that’s contained in a “Yard” location, where that “Yard” is part of a large “Field”, which is part of the “Plant” … you get the idea. The true benefit of the location hierarchy can span many points, such as easily navigating to your assets, tracking lifecycle costing, and for reporting.
Now back to the point – How can we build this hierarchy into Maximo?
To cover this point, I will make 2 assumptions. The first, is that the GIS system already contains the location hierarchy information. The second part assumes that your Maximo Spatial Location integration is mostly ready, and this blog will guide you through the remaining sections to set up your hierarchy.
Let’s Begin:
1. Go to the Object Structure application and search for “ARCGISLOCATION”.2. On the Source Objects Section, add a new Source Object "LOCHIERARCHY".
3. Go to your JSON Mapping Application, and select your Location Mapping
4. In the Properties, add a new JSON Object Mapping
Object: “LOCHIERARCHY”
Object Path: “LOCATIONS/LOCHIERARCHY”
Property Path: “//features/attributes”
SYSTEMID: “PRIMARY”
ORGID: “ALBERTA”
SITEID: “EDM”
PARENT: $.MyLocationParentFromGIS
Please note, you can map “SYSTEMID” field to the attribute containing System from GIS, or you can manually enter the value if it’s the same across the entire layer. The Parent field is the key value that will contain an already integrated location into Maximo. Therefore, when synchronizing your data, it’s important to first send locations on the top of the hierarchy to avoid multiple runs, or errors during the import.
If you have any questions around this process, or would like to learn more about Maximo Spatial, please feel free to reach out to Interloc.