How many of you would be interested in a solution that gave you the ability to approve work orders or whatever thru emails?  This is how it would work.  Maximo will send out emails based on certain criteria, let’s say a work order that is in WAPPR status.  You would receive this email on your Blackberry, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad or whatever mobile device you use and it would contain the workorder number and a description.  From there you can click on a link or button to either approve it or reject it.

I know there are other software out there that does this sort of thing, but those require you to install email forms on your device. Our solution doesn’t require anything to be installed and can be used by any email client.  Of course our solution is also very lightweight and would be much more cost effective for a simple business process like this.

Please leave any comments below…

Update:

Here is a little bit more detail of how it would work.  The emails being sent would be sent using escalations.  It would check for WAPPR workorders and send an email to whomever you define.  It can be a person group, the supervisor or lead person on the workorder, or whomever you define in the escalation.  Once the email is sent, it would contain description information of the workorder such as workorder number, description, status, location, asset, etc.  You can define what’s in the email itself with the communication template.  The email also has two links, one to approve it and the other to cancel it.  You simply click on either action and it sends another email to Maximo which then processes that email through the email listener. You will then receive a follow up email stating the status change was completed.  Since it follows all of Maximo business rules, if an error occurred, for example if the workorder was already approved, you will receive an email stating that the workorder was already approved and the date and time it was approved.

I may have a video of it in action, so stay tuned…

Update: I just came from IBM Pulse 2011 and I heard from @mygeekdaddy that IBM is going to release an update to Maximo 7.1.1.6 that enables this feature for FREE!