From Work Centers to Role-Based Applications: The Maximo Manage 9 UI Shift

Part 2 of the MAS MANAGE series. This is the change everyone asks about first — what happened to Work Centers, and what you use instead.

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🎯 Who this is for: Maximo administrators, planners, and team leads who rolled out Work Centers to their users and now need to know what changed in Manage 9, what replaced each one, and how to move people across without a help-desk storm.
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Estimated read time: 20 minutes

🔥 The Question Everyone Asks First

You did the work. You enabled Work Centers, pointed your technicians and supervisors at them, ran the training, weathered the "why does it look different?" complaints, and finally got people comfortable with the new screens. Then you opened Manage 9 and the Work Centers were... gone.

So let me answer the question directly, because you have probably been hunting through release notes for it:

Work Centers are removed in Maximo Manage 9.0. The workflows were not all deleted, but they did not all move into one-for-one replacement apps either.

This is not IBM yanking a feature out from under you. It is a platform consolidation that has been coming for a while. Work Centers were an early, separate attempt at a modern, persona-focused UI. The Maximo Application Framework — MAF, also called the Graphite platform — is the mature version of that idea, and it is the same framework that powers Maximo Mobile. Rather than maintain two modern UI stacks forever, IBM moved key experiences into MAF role-based apps, moved mobile execution into Maximo Mobile, moved manager landing pages toward Operational Dashboard surfaces, and left deep transactional work in the classic applications.

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💡 Key insight: Do not look for a single "new Work Center" menu. Look for the workflow: inspections authoring in a MAF app, field execution in Maximo Mobile, storeroom work in role-based/mobile apps, management views in Operational Dashboard, and deep record maintenance in classic applications.
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🧭 A Short History, So the Change Makes Sense

Work Centers did not vanish overnight. They faded over several releases, which is why your environment may have looked different depending on when you upgraded.

╔═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║              THE SLOW SUNSET OF WORK CENTERS                   ║
╠═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║                                                               ║
║  Maximo 7.6.x   First Work Centers appear (Service Request,   ║
║                 Inspection, later Supervisor / Technician,    ║
║                 Inventory, Procurement)                        ║
║        │                                                      ║
║  MAS 8.x        Work Centers expand, then begin to be         ║
║                 retired as MAF apps mature                     ║
║        │                                                      ║
║  MAS 8.x        Later 8.x releases narrow the Work Center      ║
║                 footprint as Mobile and MAF apps mature        ║
║        │                                                      ║
║  MAS Manage 9.0 Work Centers REMOVED                          ║
║                 → workflows move to MAF, Mobile, dashboards    ║
║                                                               ║
╚═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

By the time you reach the late MAS 8 stream, the Work Center footprint had already narrowed. Manage 9.0 closes the chapter. IBM's Work Centers documentation states that in Maximo Application Suite 9.0 and Maximo Manage 9.0, all Work Centers are removed, and the Manage 9.0 change notes specifically call out the Inspection Forms and Manage Monitoring Information Work Centers as deprecated from that release.

🔁 What Replaced What

Here is the mapping you came for — not as a perfect rename table, but as the practical place the workflow now lives.

Work Center workflow — Practical replacement in Manage 9 — Built on — Where it lives

Inspection form authoring — Inspection Forms application — Maximo Application Framework (MAF) — Planning module

Mobile inspection / work execution — Maximo Mobile apps — Maximo Application Framework / Mobile — Mobile app and role-based surfaces

Storeroom issues, returns, transfers, counts — Issues and Transfers and related inventory/mobile apps — Maximo Application Framework / Mobile — Inventory and mobile surfaces

Maintenance-manager landing page — Operational Dashboard / Maintenance Manager — MAF role-based dashboard surface — Navigation menu / dashboards

Monitoring / system information — Maximo Management Interface and MAS administration tools — MAS / Manage administration tooling — Administration / system tooling

A few notes that matter when you go looking for these:

  • Inspection Forms is the cleanest one-to-one swap. IBM's wording is direct: "The Inspection Forms Work Center is replaced with a new Maximo Application Framework application that has the same functionality." You will find it under Planning → Role Based Applications → Inspection Forms, and it brings a refreshed Inspection Form Builder with drag-and-drop authoring. We dedicate Part 5 to this application in depth.
  • Inventory is not a single renamed app. Its functionality is spread across role-based and mobile inventory applications, with Issues and Transfers as the most prominent. Storeroom-clerk tasks — issues, returns, transfers, counts — now live in these focused apps rather than one monolithic Work Center. Part 9 covers the inventory side.
  • Operational Dashboard fills the manager landing-page gap. It is the modern place to combine KPI cards, work queues, quick actions, and shortcuts for a role or process. We cover the technical model in Part 11 because it is both a user experience and an administration/security concern.
  • Manage Monitoring Information was replaced by Maximo Management Interface, which keeps a similar name and role. Its module placement is less prominently documented than the other two, so confirm its exact location in your specific build.

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⚠️ Watch out: "Same functionality" is IBM's explicit parity claim for the delivered Inspection Forms replacement. Do not generalize it blindly to every Work Center workflow. If you customized a Work Center — added a query, a card, a tailored data source — you must verify that the equivalent exists in the new role-based, mobile, dashboard, or classic path before you switch users over. Custom Work Center configurations do not automatically carry into a MAF app.
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🧩 What a Role-Based Application Actually Is

If Work Centers and role-based applications both give you a "modern, persona-focused screen," what is the real difference? It comes down to the framework underneath.

A role-based application (RBA) is a task-focused application built on the Maximo Application Framework (MAF / Graphite). Three properties make it different from both the classic UI and the old Work Centers:

  1. It is curated for a persona. Instead of the dense, do-everything classic screen, an RBA shows a specific role the cards, lists, and actions that role actually needs — a technician sees assigned work and the actions to progress it; an inspector sees forms to complete.
  2. It runs on the same framework as Maximo Mobile. This is the big one. Because RBAs and Maximo Mobile are both MAF/Graphite, the same definition can surface on a desktop browser and a mobile device. Build an inspection form once; it works in both places. This is why, throughout this series, we keep saying "desktop and mobile share an engine."
  3. It coexists with the classic applications. RBAs do not replace Work Order Tracking, Assets, or Inventory's classic XML-defined apps. Users move between the two worlds, and both write to the exact same WORKORDER, ASSET, and INVENTORY tables. Nothing about the data model changes.
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  THE THREE-LAYER UI PICTURE IN MANAGE 9                        │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                                                                │
│   CLASSIC APPS            ROLE-BASED APPS         MAXIMO       │
│   (XML-defined)           (MAF / Graphite)        MOBILE       │
│   Work Order Tracking     Inspection Forms        (MAF)        │
│   Assets, Locations       Issues and Transfers      │          │
│   Inventory, Purchasing   Users, Security Groups    │          │
│   Application Designer     Mobile Configuration      │          │
│        │                       │                     │          │
│        └─────── same MBOs ─────┴──────── same  ──────┘          │
│                 same database              definitions          │
│                                            (forms, layouts)     │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

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💡 Key insight: The whole point of MAF is consolidation. One framework powers role-based apps and mobile, so IBM (and you) maintain one modern UI stack instead of two — and a single form or app definition can reach a desk and a phone at once.
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🆕 The Role-Based Applications Keep Growing

Work Centers shrank; role-based applications expanded — and they are no longer only about technicians and inspectors. MAS 9.1 added a wave of administrative role-based applications, signaling that IBM intends to move more and more of Manage onto MAF over time. New MAF role-based applications introduced around MAS 9.1 include:

  • Users
  • Security Groups
  • User Profile
  • Mobile Configuration
  • Incident Reporter (for HSE / Oil & Gas use cases)

Alongside these, MAS 9.1 unified the navigation. The old split between a left-hand menu and a right-hand "9-dot" menu was consolidated into a single, unified navigation menu — so finding both your classic apps and your role-based apps got simpler.

Old world: "Open the Go To menu, drill into the module, find the application."

>

MAS world: "Open the unified menu, expand the section, pin what you use — classic and role-based apps side by side."

The direction of travel is clear: administrative tasks that used to require a classic screen (managing users, security groups, mobile configuration) are steadily becoming role-based applications. You do not have to migrate to them all at once — the classic apps remain — but it is worth knowing where the product is heading.

🛠️ Moving Your Users Across: A Practical Plan

Because no transactional data changes when you move from Work Centers to role-based applications, mobile apps, and dashboard surfaces, this is fundamentally a retraining and validation exercise, not a migration. Treat it that way and it stays calm.

  1. Inventory your Work Center usage. List which Work Centers your users actually open and which personas rely on them. In late MAS 8 environments, focus especially on inspection authoring, inventory/storeroom workflows, maintenance-manager landing pages, and monitoring/system-information tasks — plus any Work Center habits you retired along the way.
  2. Catalog customizations. For each Work Center in use, note any custom queries, cards, or data sources. These are the items that need a verified equivalent in the replacement workflow — they are your real risk, not the delivered functionality.
  3. Map personas to the new apps. Inspectors → Inspection Forms and Maximo Mobile Inspections. Storeroom clerks → Issues and Transfers and inventory/mobile apps. Maintenance managers → Operational Dashboard / Maintenance Manager views. Administrators → the new Users / Security Groups / Mobile Configuration apps where they fit, with classic applications still available for deeper configuration. Write the mapping down; it becomes your training outline.
  4. Validate parity in a non-production environment. Open each replacement app, walk the persona's core tasks, and confirm the delivered functionality plus your custom needs are met before anyone in production depends on it.
  5. Retrain on navigation first. Most "it's broken" tickets are really "I can't find it" tickets. The unified menu and the role-based app cards are the two things to demonstrate up front.
  6. Decommission deliberately. Once a persona is comfortable on the replacement path and parity is confirmed, retire their old Work Center habit. Do it persona by persona, not all at once.

🎯 The Commandments of the Work Center Transition

  1. Thou shalt not panic — the workflows moved, they did not vanish.
  2. Thou shalt map by persona and workflow — inspections, inventory, mobile work, management dashboards, and administration each land in different places.
  3. Thou shalt treat custom Work Center config as the real risk, not the delivered features.
  4. Thou shalt remember RBAs share a framework with Mobile — build once, serve both.
  5. Thou shalt migrate users by persona, validating parity before you retire anything.

Key Takeaways

  • Work Centers are removed in Maximo Manage 9.0. Many were already retired before that release, and IBM specifically called out Inspection Forms and Manage Monitoring Information as deprecated in the 9.0 change notes.
  • Replacements are spread across MAF role-based applications, Maximo Mobile, Operational Dashboard surfaces, and classic applications — the same database remains underneath.
  • The Inspection Forms Work Center became the MAF Inspection Forms app in the Planning module, with the same functionality and a refreshed Form Builder.
  • Inventory functionality moved to role-based and mobile apps such as Issues and Transfers; maintenance-manager views moved toward Operational Dashboard surfaces; monitoring/system information moved into Maximo Management Interface and MAS administration tooling.
  • MAS 9.1 added administrative role-based apps (Users, Security Groups, User Profile, Mobile Configuration, Incident Reporter) and unified the navigation menu.
  • The move is a retraining and validation exercise, not a data migration — no transactional data changes.

References

IBM Official

Community

Series Navigation

Previous: — Part 1 — The New Manage in MAS 9

Next: — Part 3 — Work Management Reimagined

Published by TheMaximoGuys | June 2026

About TheMaximoGuys: We help Maximo developers and teams navigate the move to MAS — from architecture and migration planning to the day-to-day work of configuring, extending, and running Maximo Manage. This series is the guide we wish we'd had.