Maximo has consistently remained at the top of the list of Enterprise Asset Management systems throughout the years. While there are many reasons for this, one of the most important reasons has been its ability to easily adapt to different business requirements through configuration of the system. In earlier versions, developers were able to extend core Maximo Java classes to invoke specific business logic. This offered an unprecedented amount of control for organizations to be able to tweak the solution to fit their needs. While this capability still exists, many organizations have subsequently shied away from these types of changes as they have upgraded their systems over the years. The skills necessary to maintain these customizations were difficult for a lot of organizations to supply, and IBM, understandably so, did not offer support for those heavily customized systems. Automation Scripting was a new feature that was introduced in Maximo v7.5 based on the feedback from the user community. Customers yearned to have a simpler, yet effective way of customizing the product without having to go through the pain of system downtime and adopting the steep learning curve that came with Java coding and extending the existing Maximo classes. Automation Scripting provides a lot of benefits to make custom business logic easy within Maximo. However, having knowledge of the Java methods available on Maximo Business Objects (MBOs) can greatly enhance your ability to perform meaningful or deep business logic changes within the system. Subsequent blog article entries will cover in detail how to:

1. Working with collection objects (MBO Sets)
2. Reading single attributes of a collection
3. Reading multiple attributes of a collection
4. Modifying an object in a collection
5. Adding new objects to the collection
6. Exception handling
7. Attributes with value lists
8. Changing status
9. Object relationships
10. Query by example
11. Long descriptions

… and more. Hopefully these articles will unlock the ability to make the most out of the Automation Scripting capabilities of Maximo, and allow users to develop some useful business logic enhancements to their Maximo systems.  Look for our MBOs in Automation Scripts Series to run on the third Thursday of the month until completion.  And also check out some of our other articles here.