If you generate workorders from PM’s that have a lot of job tasks, you may have noticed that the parent workorder numbers are not in order or sequential. It may seem like the workorder numbers are skipping when they shouldn’t be, but in fact, what’s happening is this. When a PM, that has job tasks associated with it, is generated into a workorder, those individual tasks use up workorder autonumber keys. So if your job plan has 30 tasks, it will use 30 workorder autonumber keys and I think this is unnecessary. If you have a lot of PM’s, this number can get high pretty quickly. I think the workorder autonumber should be used only for that purpose. So here is how you setup different autonumber keys for workorder tasks so that you don’t use all the autonumber values.

First off, there are three modules, not including the workorder module that use the WORKORDERNUM autokey.  They are WOACTIVITY, WOCHANGE, and WORELEASE.  You can create three different autokeys for each module if you want, but I will show you how to create one for WOACTIVITY as the process is all the same.

Go to Database Configuration bring up the WOACTIVITY Object. Then go to the Attributes tab and search for WONUM. Expand the WONUM Attribute. In the Advanced section change the value Autonumber property to be WOACTIVITYNUM. In the details section enter &AUTOKEY& into the Default Value and save. You should get a message that the WOACTIVITYNUM autoseed does not exist and it asks if would you like to create it? Of course you do so click Yes.

Now go to Organizations -> Select Action -> Autonumber Setup -> Organization Level and you should now see WOACTIVITYNUM. It is recommended that you add a prefix to the autoseed.

Lastly, stop the webserver and run configdb.bat. Or you could config the DB from within Maximo.

Now when you generate a PM, the tasks should now have their own autonumber values.