Track device maintenance?

[DCIM_Support]

This question was originally posted on DCIM Support by adelaney on 2017-03-10

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Is there any way to track PMs on CRAC units and fire suppression systems? I tried doing this by adding Maintenance Date under the Properties (Custom) but it looks like you can only select that category once. Anyone else have a way of doing this?

(CID:113644332)

[DCIM_Support]

This answer was originally posted on DCIM Support by Ed Tarento on 2017-03-10

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Hi again Austin

If you have the StruxureWare DCO add on module "Change" you can create Work Orders, repeating work orders and a whole raft of other features to help with what I think you're asking.

If not, there is/may be a way to do what you're after, depending on how important it is to you / how much $ you want to invest to solve the issue.  There's no product to be purchased, I think e.g. time to set it up.

I believe there is a feature request in the system to add a DCO Custom Property type of "date".  Whilst we wait for that (Kolding?) you can add dates as YYYYMMDD.  This format allows for sorting

One way to do something like this may be to track the maint activities and schedule outside DCO, e.g. spreadsheets on a shared group drive, mounted to each user's desktop on the same disk, e.g. Drive "G", and link the asset using a Custom Property of type text with the value "file://g:/maint/deviceName.xls" .  (I haven't worked on how to accommodate spaces in the path").  Note the use of all forward slashes.  If you have the syntax correct, as soon as you press return after entering the CP value, you'll see it turn blue and underlined i.e. is clickable.  Right click on your asset and you should now see an option at the bottom of the popup called "Custom Links" which will show all the links for this device, maint activities, documentation, photos etc. 

If you are tracking your maint activities in another system and that system can uniquely identify a URL/URI for each device, you may be able to link to the other system using the same DCO CP method.

This can be quite an onerous task to set them all up so if your file names match the device names (helps if they're unique and/or stored in a hierarchy similar to DCO's) you can use the API  (either one I think?) to automatically create and maintain the links, e.g. run the process every night.  You can do the same with DCO Import DB, although this has an extra step of someone having to do Device Association.  Again, if you devices are uniquely identifiable e.g. by name, then you can use the Auto Associate to do bulk associations - much much faster.

I favour the API path as there is no user intervention required.  The links just magically maintain themselves at least they did when I tried this many moons ago.   But requires some coding, test/dev etc etc.  Contact me if you need more help and please share your experience with the forum

Ed 

(CID:113644463)

[DCIM_Support]

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