Where it started#
For more than a decade, I was the lead developer of a data management tool for Maximo. It started around 2009, with Maximo 6.2 and 7.1. I was already a freelancer then, and I worked a lot for EAM Software and EAM Swiss.
The tool changed its name a few times. It started as EAM Importer, became EAM Data Manager, and then the EAM Data Management Tool. Today its name is maximex.
Built with what Maximo offered then#
We built it with the means we had at the time. Maximo had no automation scripts yet. Everything was Java code, and everything was tied to the Maximo user interface and to each application.
We started with the features that were the most useful and the most pressing: the ones we needed ourselves as an IBM business partner. Then customers came. We listened to their feedback and built what they asked for, and so the product grew.
At its heart was the workbook. An Excel file holds one sheet per object, with the attribute names in row 2 and the data from row 4. One sheet can carry main records together with their child records, and control columns tell the importer what to do with a row. Over the years, customers built whole libraries of these workbooks.
Where it went#
Through several mergers and acquisitions, the product ended up at SPIE RODIAS GmbH. The strategy changed there, and development slowed down. As an external partner and freelancer, I was given no more assignments. One of my last tasks was to prepare the first customization archive files for the Maximo Application Suite.
It was a great product, and it was great work. Things change, though. We grew apart, and we parted ways years ago.
Maximo changed underneath#
In the meantime, IBM Maximo went through a major change of technology. The Maximo Application Suite runs on OpenShift, signs its users in centrally, and offers new ways to build products and to integrate them into the suite.
Anyone who designs a data import tool today would design it differently from the way we did back then.
A new tool, built from scratch#
So in 2026, I finally decided to build a new tool, designed the way one would design it today for the Maximo Application Suite:
- No Java code. Inside Manage, the tool needs four small automation scripts, and it installs them itself.
- No integration into every Maximo application. It is a companion app with its own screens, running beside Manage.
- MAS signs the users in. People log in with their MAS account, and the tool works with their own rights in Manage. Manage checks every record as if they had typed it in.
- Easy to deploy. The tool runs as one container in the MAS cluster on OpenShift.
MAS Data Import is a new product with its own code base. We wrote it from scratch, in TypeScript, and it contains no code from maximex or from any earlier version of that tool. maximex is written in Java; MAS Data Import has no Java code at all. maximex is a product of SPIE RODIAS GmbH, and MAS Data Import is a separate product of Fiedler IT.
Two things carried over. The first is experience: over the years I learned a lot about data management and data import in Maximo, and that knowledge shaped the new design. The second is the workbook format. MAS Data Import is built against it, so the workbooks that customers built over the years import as they are. The few sheet kinds it leaves out, it names in the plan.
What comes next#
The next article is about that workbook: what it can express, and why MAS Data Import reads it. The MAS Data Import page lists the whole series.
Want to see MAS Data Import on your own workbooks? Get in touch.