7 part series
A six-part edge-filler series on the Work Order changes that the standard MAS 9 Manage guides skip: the Service Request RBA, the Approvals application and electronic signatures, the Operational Dashboard and out-of-the-box WO KPIs, custom KPI creation, rationalizing BIRT into KPI Manager, and the new WO REST and Kafka integration surface.
The Service Request Work Center is gone. Here's what replaced it in MAS 9 Manage — the classic SR app in Carbon, the Service Request Role-Based Application on MAF, the dedicated SR mobile app in 9.0 and 9.1 — and the honest truth about the single-screen SR-to-WO conversion that no longer exists.
Approving a work order looks different in MAS 9. Here's the honest picture — the Workflow Designer is unchanged and your 7.6 workflows carry forward, the new Approvals Role-Based Application replaces the Work Supervisor approval flow (with one gap), watsonx-powered Work Order Intelligence recommends a failure code with a confidence score at approval, and electronic signatures can be enforced on specific status changes for regulated work.
IBM's Operational Dashboard is the strategic replacement for Start Centers as the maintenance manager's command center. Here's what ships out of the box in MAS 9 Manage — the WO KPIs, the pre-built Maintenance Manager dashboard, the card types worth knowing — and the honest 9.1 limitation that keeps many teams running Start Centers side by side.
Part 3 showed you how to consume the operational dashboard. This is the other half: how to build your own work order KPIs in MAS 9. The KPI Manager application, custom queries against any Maximo object, refresh intervals, green/yellow/red thresholds, trend calculations, matching a KPI to the right card type, and the MAS 9.1 ability for KPI services to return JSON from an external API.
BIRT is not formally deprecated in MAS 9 and your existing work order reports still run. The upgrade mistake is treating the report catalog as a rebuild backlog. Here's how to rationalize WO reporting into KPI Manager cards, keep the reports that must stay reports, and know exactly when Cognos Analytics earns the job.
The work order integration surface moved in MAS 9. Here's the JSON API for work orders — /api/os/mxwodetail with lean=1 — with real query and create examples, Kafka events for near-real-time WO changes, and the honest posture on MIF: it still works, but new integrations belong on REST and Kafka.
