Did you know that Maximo has a built in timer functionality that will let laborers start a record and then later stop it and record that transaction in the LABTRANS table?  Well, it does and it’s a great feature to have, especially on a mobile device like EZMaxMobile.  It just makes total sense to start/stop a work order with single click instead of manually entering your time or hours.  But for some reason, IBM decided not to put this functionality in work order tracking, but you can easily add it yourself.

This will work for both Maximo 6 and 7.  First go to Application Designer and open WOTRACK.  Click Select Action -> Add/Modify Toolbar Menu.  Click on ‘New Row’ and add these two new menu items:

Start Timer:

• Element Type: OPTION
• Key Value: STARTIMER
• Position: 40
• Subposition: 0
• Image: nav_icon_timer_on.gif
• Visible: checked
• Tabs: MAIN

Stop Timer:

• Element Type: OPTION
• Key Value: STOPTIMER
• Position: 41
• Subposition: 0
• Image: nav_icon_timer_off.gif
• Visible: checked
• Tabs: MAIN

The position value can be whatever you want as long as it’s not already taken but those should work for you just fine.  Now save the design and open Work Order Tracking and open a work order.  You should now see this  in your toolbar.  The green button will start the timer and the red will stop the timer.  In order for this to work properly though, is to make sure that your work order has a GL Account value specified.  When you start the timer, it will take the current GL Account value and add it to the labor transaction record in the actuals tab.  The transaction will have a timer status of ACTIVE to indicate that the laborer is currently working on this.

And then when you stop the timer, the status will be COMPLETE and a dialog will pop up to show you more details about the transaction where you can then modify the end time if needed.

Now if you don’t specify a  GL Account on a work order, then this won’t work properly, but there is a nice way around it.  You can add default GL Accounts to a labor record, so that anytime they start/stop a work order, it will use that default GL Account to populate the LABTRANS record.  By default, this field is not available in the Labor application, but here is an article from IBM on how to setup default GL Accounts for a labor with application designer.