Maximo Webservice Interaction

Currently, I am engaged in project of Astra Daihatsu Motors to implement Maximo. This company currently implement SAP for their Finance. This is quite interesting to deal with. You may know that SAP has PI (Process Integration), while Maximo got MEA/MIF for the integration framework. SAP is implemented by AGIT (it may stand for Astra Graphia IT, not sure). You know when the first, we had a meeting with SAP team. We asked them to use DB as the endpoint for our integration. Surprisingly, they said that SAP cannot be configured to have DB as the endpoint. Uhhmmm, well, I had a thought that "is the SAP which has a very dull Integration component or is it about their capability of SAP implementation?".Well, I think is not the problem of SAP as SAP is a huge complex enterprise application which is not supposed to incapable of having such integration.

Hahaha, after the discussion, we, Maximo team, had a discussion regarding the SAP team. and yes, it was as what I thought. With all those stupid people, how could it be possible for AGIT to not know the way.

Ok, let's continue with the topic of this blog. After having discussion, we both agree that we gonna use webservice and yes, we, Maximo Team, are the one who perform most of the configuration -.-" (while we had a talk before the meeting that we gonna asked them to do the work most, mission failed...hahaha). Ok, then in Maximo we had Interaction diagram which can be used to do the work. As we do not need to perform any code to use this. This feature is very handy in this situation. Just doing configuration and not coding. Very nice of Maximo Feature here (I should get credit for this). But the bad news is that this feature cannot deal with SOAP which require header in the request. You will get an error of axis (I forget the error message). But, it may be fulfilled if I do some coding in the mapping class in the Interaction (I havent tried this anyway but will try later).

Maximo does not publish the changes created by MIF

During my project in AORA, I have been configuring a lot about integration/MIF as it deals a lot with external application so called Satellite Application. The idea is the satellite application does not deal directly to Maximo database, but they are accessing Maximo database through iface table. Well, that is general idea of why Integration exists.

In the business process of our client, there is a process to transfer their assets from one storeroom to another storeroom. Well, the satellite application will expect to have a record of Transfer Order to perform Transfer Out-In process. The record is created in the iface table (this is the term representing a table used to exchange data between external application and maximo). Transfer out will be performed first, from Maximo. Once, the process of transfer out is finished. Transfer in will be processed. Transfer in will not be executed if the transfer out has not been done. The transfer asset process involves a hundred of assets to be transferred even thousand, thus, we cannot use a standard Maximo to do this.

To fulfill the above scenario, I make some customization to process the assets. I am using excel reader to read excel and then process it to MIF. Using MIF, I am able to create record. Well, upon creating the record I am expecting to get a record for transfer in. But in fact, it does not get created which is weird. I have created a publish channel to monitor the objects but still the transfer in object does not get created. Well, my hypothesis is that it has different behavior between integration and created directly from UI, which I think, it is not supposed to be so. Thus, the solution to deal with with the problem is to perform some changes on the object either using mbo changes or using escalation to monitor the existence of object and do some changes (adding description to object or any kind of changes to trigger MIF to publish the changes) on that.