Greetings
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As we head into our summer months we have provided a
content-rich newsletter. We hope you can spend a few minutes
to gather some news about WorkTech and WorkTech customers as
well as pick up some useful tips on WorkTech Products. We
have a new customer that recently went live, a new Senior
Sales Consultant who will focus on the energy sector, and
are planning an innaugural WorkTech Time user group meeting
to support our growing client base. Read an interview about
CCTS, our contract management add-in to Maximo. Finally, our
"Time Out" joke is a classic.
The Team at WorkTech
WorkTech |
| Minnesota Power saves time and improves accuracy
with WorkTech Time
Minnesota Power's highly customized asset management
system wasn't meeting their business needs for labor
reporting; the employees found it cumbersome to enter and
correct time entries. So they implemented and integrated
WorkTech Time to help them handle their complex labor
reporting needs, to reduce labor reporting costs, and to
increase employee satisfaction. Learn more about how they
are using WorkTech Time in this customer profile
Minnesota Power Profile |
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| New WorkTech Certified System Administrators
 Seven people who work at
and support BP Texas City IT are justifiably proud of being
certified as System Administrators for WorkTech Contractor
Cost Tracking System. They successfully absorbed a massive
amount of information in their four-day course and passed
the culminating test.
Photo. From left to right: Hanson, Mike (Fluor Global
Services), Rodriguez, Brenda (Fluor), Garcia, Sonya D
(Fluor), Prewitt, Doris R (BP), Civirala, Shiva (Satyam
Computers Services), Hundley, Edward J (SAIC), Garman, David
(not in photo).
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| Welcome John Tobin
We are happy to have John Tobin join us to focus on sales
to the refinery, chemical and utilities industries. Most
recently he was at Lomic Software Engineering following a
number of years at Computer Associates, Unisys Corporation
and DEC/Compaq. John has had his career focused on selling
enterprise solutions to the oil, gas and energy verticals
throughout the gulf states.
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| Upcoming Partner Events & Conferences
 We look forward to seeing
you at MRO World 2006 July 23rd-26th at Walt Disney World.
You'll find WorkTech in booths 29 & 30. We'll be pleased
to show you new features including WorkTech Time labor entry
kiosks and Contractor Cost Tracking System for MXES.
Because a major item of interest is MXES upgrades,
we will have staff on hand to discuss MXES upgrade services
and implications to WorkTech Software in your upgrade
process.
Also come see us at the 5th Annual Outage
Management for Power Plants Conference August 7-9 in Las
Vegas, Nevada.
We were happy to meet old friends and
new prospects at some recent events, namely the Groupe
Francofone des Usagers Maximo in Montreal, the Electric
Power conference in Atlanta, GA., and the maintenance
conference of the National Petroleum and Refining
Association in El Paso, TX.
WorkTech Show Schedule
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| WorkTech Time User Group
The planning has begun for a formal WorkTech Time User
Group meeting in Spring of 2007. If you have interest or
input in this event, we welcome your ideas, email them to
tom.frederick@worktech.com.
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| WorkTech Messenger and Alerts
WorkTech Time customers really appreciate this add-on
product that automatically sends personalized email alerts
and information to management, staff and employees. Messages
can be broadcast as well as targeted. They can, for example,
remind an employee about their vacation balance or a missing
time entry, remind supervisors to approve time, and let
managers know about missing time reports and upcoming
employee leave. It can distribute notifications and reports
when needed to focus on high priority actions.
WorkTech Messenger & Alerts
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| Contract Management and Contractor Cost Tracking
(CCTS)
 In their recent report on
Contract Management, Aberdeen recommended that corporations
integrate contract management to other systems and to
utilize reporting and analytical capabilities regularly to
measure performance. With contract management a feature of
MXES, we explore the relationship between MXES and WorkTech
CCTS with our Director of Consulting & Implementation
Services, Marthinus Boshoff.
Q. Marthinus, How
does WorkTech's CCTS aid companies in performing better
contract management?
M. CCTS extends cost collection
outside the enterprise, gathering costs for contractor
labor, materials, and rental charges. Capturing that
important and critical cost data as it is incurred enables
near real time performance and cost measurement.
Q.
Where does CCTS fit related to transactional
compliance?
M. CCTS can be the central repository
for all the rate schedules and payment terms. It can be
integrated with Maximo and other enterprise systems. CCTS
will automatically track and automatically validate pricing
for services or other requirements at point of transaction.
Q. How can CCTS be used to improve operational
excellence?
M. CCTS insures compliance with agreed
rates and schedules; data is validated on entry avoiding
payment disputes and related auditing issues. CCTS provides
frontline managers and supervision the ability proactively
manage projects based upon having visibility of most current
costs in an actionable form.
Q. How does CCTS
work with the Contract Management capabilities of MXES?
M. MXES manages the contract documents and processes,
CCTS captures actual labor, materials and third party
charges, validates the agreed to rates as the tasks are
entered, manages a multi-tiered approval process, and then
sends the valid, approved charges to MXES where invoices are
generated on behalf of the contractors.
Q. Does
Maximo need to be customized to implement CCTS?
M.
No customization of MXES is required.
We are happy
to talk to you about how you can close the contract
management loop by ensuring costs are captured when they are
incurred and validated when entered, giving frontline
managers and management visibility into your spend. Contact
sales@worktech.com
More on CCTS
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| WorkTech Time Leave Time Technical Tip: Reporting
Leave When Not Authorized
Can you prevent an employee from reporting non-approved
leave time? For example, suppose I take vacation time from
June 19-22 but take the 23rd off, too, and then attempt to
report it in WorkTech Time as Vacation.
WorkTech
Leave Time has several ways to configure this:
1.
There is a Leave Time control variable, VALIDATELEAVE, where
the entire process may be turned on or off by department or
other organizational group in your company. If it is turned
off, it is up to the employee and supervisor to monitor the
problem.
2. If you choose to validate leave, you can
then control either on entry or on approval whether to
ignore, warn or prevent the discrepancy. And you can do so
on entry of the time, or approval of the time by the
supervisor.
For example, assume I've set up my
department so that WorkTech Leave Time warns on time entry,
and prevents on time approval. Thus, when I report Vacation
on the non approved date, a warning message appears: “You do
not have scheduled leave for 23 June, 2006. Save anyway?” I
go ahead and save and then make my request on the Leave
screen, explaining that I had called my supervisor and
gotten the extra day approved verbally. Then, my supervisor
on approval is prevented from approving the extra vacation
until s/he opens the Leave Time screen and approves the
leave.
There are dozens of other variations. If you
wish to use these features at your site and need some
advice, contact support@worktech.com.
More on Leave Time
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QuickPick
Quick Tips – Making Fields Read-Only by User, Group or Craft
A user asked how they could configure the work order
tracking module such that the work type field could only be
modified by the supervisor of the work order. With QuickPick
there are several ways this could be achieved, in this case
a simple read-only rule is the most effective.
As
with most QuickPick rules the logic is applied using
standard SQL syntax, in this case we want to create a query
that returns data (and therefore makes the field read-only)
if the current users ID matches the supervisor of the work
order. To achieve this we just compare the current user’s
login name (made available by QuickPick as ) to the value in
the supervisor field for the current work order, as follows:
SELECT DISTINCT 1 FROM DUMMY_TABLE WHERE :SUPERVISOR
<>
With this rule in assigned to the WORKTYPE
field it will be protected whenever a user other than the
work orders supervisor logs in. For example this work orders
supervisor is WILSON, when WILSON logs in the Work Type
field is editable as you would expect as seen in the graphic
above.
However when a different user such as SMITH
views the same work order the work type field will be made
read-only such that it cannot be modified as in the second
graphic.
As well as making fields read-only
QuickPick can also hide the field or validate the data as it
is being saved and raise appropriate error messages.
QuickPick provides a full complement of value list,
validation and security functions to enable you to customize
any version of Maximo without requiring any programming
whatsoever. With QP it is possible to manage security
controls on an individual basis - as opposed to a Security
Group basis only
More
about QuickPick |
| Fast Track WorkTech Support
Have you tried the new, fast way to get support from
WorkTech? WorkTech's online Issue Tracking System is
accessible 24x7 so that when you want to request support,
you can do so immediately and, once in the Issue Tracking
System, you can monitor the progress of your issue.
To give Issue Tracking a try, go to
http://www.worktech.com/issues. If you don't have a login
yet, click the REGISTER link on the main login page to sign
up for free. You will need your License Serial Number as it
appears on the License sheet provided with the shipment of
your WorkTech software.
Issue Tracking Support
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| Time Out
A lawyer dies and goes to Heaven. "There must be some
mistake," the lawyer argues. "I’m too young to die. I’m only
fifty five." "Fifty five?" says Saint Peter. "No, according
to our calculations, you’re eighty two." "How’d you get
that?" the lawyer asks. Answers St. Peter: "We added up your
time sheets."
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Here's wishing you a wonderful summer.
Sincerely,
--The Team at
WorkTech |
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