Delete an item from Item Master in Maximo 7

Written by Chon Neth, Editor-in-Chief

OK, the title of this post might be a bit misleading, but in Maximo 7, you can’t actually delete items from the Item Master.  This is not a bug and it’s actually meant to be this way.  In order to “delete” an item, you basically just have to change the status of the item to “OBSOLETE”.  To do this:

  1. Go to the Item Master and search for the item you wish to change the status of.
  2. From the “Select Action” menu select “Change Status”.
  3. Using the “New Status” drop down list, select the new status.
  4. In order to ensure that the status is rolled out to all Organizations and Inventory records for this item check the box labeled “Roll New Status to Organizations and Inventory?”.

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15 thoughts on “Delete an item from Item Master in Maximo 7”

  2. Anyone have any idea what the theory is behind not allowing delete on item master (or tool items for that matter)? More important – why there does not seem to be a thread of documentation on it? It appears the help in max7 was simply a regurgitation of the max6 help which states that you can delete an item master record under the right conditions yet that is not true. I’m perfectly fine with changes but misleading/completely inaccurate documentation is not acceptable.

  3. Chon,

    what is the best way to delete a large amount of assets and their history/relationships without starting from a clean database? is there a sql utility to help remove things which will keep other changes such as new applications I have built and maxrelationships i have set?

  4. I’ve been looking on IBM Support for some shred of Documentation on this new feature and exactly how it works. I’d like to know how to deal with the case where an item is required to be removed from a single storeroom without affecting other storerooms across this organisation? it doesnt seem possible from initial tests

    1. If you are dealing with storerooms, then you are dealing with inventory. Inventory app will let you deactivate a specific item for that storeroom. Item Master is just that, a blueprint of a sort, of the item accessible to all storerooms across all sites and all orgs.

      1. How does one go about deleting items from a Storeroom and delete the Storeroom? I removed the bins for that items, but I don’t see a way to remove the Inventory item from the storeroom. I am using Maximo 7.5.0.5

        1. In order to “delete” an item, you basically just have to change the status of the item to “OBSOLETE”. To do this:
          Go to the Item Master and search for the item you wish to change the status of.
          From the “Select Action” menu select “Change Status”.
          Using the “New Status” drop down list, select the new status.
          In order to ensure that the status is rolled out to all Organizations and Inventory records for this item check the box labeled “Roll New Status to Organizations and Inventory?”

  5. Setting the status to OBSOLETE is in effect a logical delete. Many software engineers view this as better than a physical delete because it does not leave orphaned references is the rest of the database. Personally I wish they would remove delete functionality from most of the objects because most of my time I am cleaning up things that turns out there was an object at the beginning of a process and it was deleted by the end like INVBALANCE records and receiving INTERNAL POs.

  6. Hey!
    If anyone would be interested in this..
    I managed to delete an item by means of web-services.
    First of all I deleted proper record from ITEMORGINFO table and then I was able to delete ITEM (all actions were done through web-service calls).

  9. Pingback: Using Rotating Items and Rotating Assets to track reparable spares in IBM Maximo | CMMS Marketplace

  10. I have 130 line items listed as a rotating items in maximo 7.5; this was loaded (by mistake) during mas load and now Ii need to move these assets to NON-rotating assets.. any idea?

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