Labor Actuals – sometimes you get a ZERO value

Written by John Reeve

Industry Best Practices

The user accidentally entered this value. Normally the Maximo screen (work order actuals or LabTrans) will capture the Starttime and Endtime and automatically populate the RegularHrs field. But sometimes you discover a zero – which means no linecost and no roll-up of costs to asset.

Further complications:

Many sites have the Org setting which “auto approves” the labor actuals, meaning once the user saves the record he can no longer directly edit that line. [of course they could insert a new line to negate the bad value, and so-on, but this is not pretty].

So my thought was to:

1) Use the AUTO APPROVE ORG setting [above]

2) Add a new ESCALATION+ACTION which resets the auto-approve to “0” …..if it finds RegularHrs=0 line.

3) Make a Start Center Result Set portlet for the Maintenance Supervisor which shows these RegularHrs=0 lines.

4) He would procedurally edit, i.e. “fix them himself” ,or, ask worker.

Exactly how do you fix them?

a) Delete the bad line {now possible because the Escalation+Action made this line editable}

b) and then, Insert the new/correct line

…………………………………………………………………

I bet if you searched your LABTRANS table right now, you would find similar entries.

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4 thoughts on “Labor Actuals – sometimes you get a ZERO value”

  1. Is there a way to add a button to execute an action to set the genapprservreceipt to 0? That way you could conditionally hide it except for supervisors/admins to allow them to “unapprove” and make changes.

      1. If the hours / costs are 0 for the line, it should not do any harm. However, if you are “unapproving” labor transactions with hours / costs, you’ll need to subtract them from the actuals (totals) when “unapproving” because when you go to re-approve it, it will add the costs again. In developer speak: approving always does a “actlabcost += newly approved labor costs” instead of “actlabcost = sum(all approved labor costs)”.

        Hope that helps!

    2. Just an FYI, I was able to create this as an automation script attached to a button. See below:

      Launch Point: UNAPPRLABOR
      Launch Point Type: ACTION
      Object: LABTRANS

      Variable: approved
      Variable Type: OUT
      Binding Type: ATTRIBUTE
      Binding Value: GENAPPRSERVRECEIPT
      Overriden? (checked)
      Suppress Access Control? (checked)

      Script: UNAPPRLABOR
      Script Language: jython
      Log Level: ERROR
      Source Code: approved=0

      Then create an Action as below:

      Action: UNAPPRLABOR
      Object LABTRANS
      Type: Custom Class
      Value: com.ibm.tivoli.maximo.script.ScriptAction
      Parameter/Attribue: UNAPPRLABOR, UNAPPRLABOR,UNAPPRLABOR
      Accessible From: ALL

      Then use the Application Designer to modify the Labor Reporting application. I added a button to the expanded view of a labor transaction as below:
      Label: Unapprove Labor Transaction
      Event: UNAPPRLABOR
      Menu Type: NONE

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