Maximo

www.ibm.com/products/maximo

Maximo is a popular product with companies that work with oil and gas. It has a lot of functionality, but ease of use is only fair. It is also very expensive. If you are looking for a very feature-rich CMMS, Maximo may be the answer.

Maximo is a native web application, with linear assets, tons of functionality, and a very good map interface. But it's not GIS-Centric.

However, the Maximo Work Order can only have a single asset. This is a major weakness. People want a multi-asset workorder. So, in order to perform a PM on 10 air conditioners, you need to generate, update, and then finally close 10 work orders. Not good.

Maximo does support Sub Work Orders. These can be nested multiple levels. You can view costs at any level. But you really have to bounce around in a lot of screens.

The complexity of the UI is daunting. It's really confusing and hard to use.

There hasn't been much progress in the product in a long time. As of this writing (2019), Wikipedia says the stable version of Maximo is 7.6, from 2014.

Upgrades in the past were extremely time-consuming (multiple days). Not sure if that is still the case.

The documentation stresses that PMs can have multiple assets - using a group. But when the work orders are generated, you get one work order for each asset. This is extremely cumbersome.

Another thing we don't like is that there is no such thing as a large text field. Apparently, the user interface hasn't been updated to realize we have 24 inch monitors. Every single large text field displays as a single line, with about 25 characters of text. To see more, you have to click an icon to the right of it. Not too impressive.

PMs are surprisingly primitive. Want to create a work order on the 5th of the month? That's not possible. You can create a monthly PM, but there's no guarantee when it will fire. You have to use predefined calendars (there's no "rules-based" option). So, when you run out of "calendar", your PM's just stop? Users don't like to manually create calendars, but you have to do it in Maximo.

Nevertheless, many large organizations have chosen Maximo. IBM is a huge name.

Maximo is fully web-based.