If you have been playing around with the Maximo Enterprise Adapter (MEA) or even the Integration Framework in Maximo 7, and you have tried to load labor transactions against a workorder, you may have encountered this very random error:

Mismatches between labor, craft, skill level, vendor and contract are not allowed. Use the Select Value lookup to see a list of valid choices

It’s not a very intuitive error when you realize the cause of it.  This error states that there is a mismatch between the labor and craft.  Even if you specify the labor’s craft in the inbound XML, you will still get this error message.  No matter what you do to the XML or labor or even craft values, you will still keep getting this error.  This error took us days to figure out in Maximo 6.2, but we eventually got it working and it wasn’t because of the labor code and craft mismatch.

For any user in the system, when  you try to enter a new workorder and the users profile doesn’t have a default site specified, you will see a dialog that says something like, “please specify a default insert site”.  If you don’t have a default insert site, then you won’t be able to insert a new workorder.  Well, that goes the same for the inbound MEA processing.  The Integration Framework as well as MEA uses the MXINTADM user, by default, to processing all inbound and outbound transactions.  So to fix this error, set this users default insert site to whatever it is you have.  It doesn’t matter as long as you don’t leave that field NULL.

So a word of advice, if you are working with the MEA or MIF, before you do any kind of inbound processing where you are inserting new records, specify a default insert site for the user MXINTADM.