Introduction - HxGN EAM - 11.07.01 - Feature Briefs - Hexagon

HxGN EAM Web Service Prompts

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English
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HxGN EAM
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Feature Briefs
HxGN EAM Version
11.7.1

Your organization has recently purchased HxGN EAM™ Extended Edition. All the right pieces are in place for a successful implementation. A large amount of equipment and maintenance data has been converted from the legacy system into HxGN EAM™. "Go Live" is just around the corner.

You realize that the nature of your business dictates that new equipment be added to the system on a regular basis. Therefore, a full-time person will be the designated data entry technician.

Training on HxGN EAM™ will be necessary. There is but a handful of data that must be collected for each equipment record, so things shouldn’t be that complicated, right? Just grant privileges to the equipment screen, maybe hide the irrelevant fields. But wait, it turns out you don’t need most available equipment fields. In addition, you will need to train the user on several different ‘tabs’ on the screen for them to enter the appropriate data. This is the only task this person must do all day long. Isn’t there a better way?

The answer is YES.

Many people are aware of the term web services as they are the technological foundation for many web-based integrations today. This is perhaps the major differentiator making HxGN EAM™ so attractive to consumers in today’s EAM market space. Web services provide the basic building blocks for the application. They contain business logic and the ability to process data though our Extended interface into the underlying database. For example, web services are used to create a new equipment record, make a comment about the new equipment, and add the new equipment into an equipment hierarchy. Traditionally this would be done using 3 separate tabs since each tab primarily uses a single web service.

Now that we’ve established how HxGN EAM™ uses these web services, how does this help us solve the problem posed earlier?

In the past, system administrators have used several powerful tools within HxGN EAM™ to configure the product to meet their business objectives. Some of the user interface configuration tools include Screen Designer and Menu permissions for user groups. These capabilities are, and will continue to be, very useful in ‘limiting’ the scope of what a user can see and do within the scope of what is delivered inside HxGN EAM™.

Web Service Prompts, by contrast, extend the capability of the product by allowing administrators to build user screens which more closely follow, and in some cases, optimize their current business processes. By using a Web Service Prompt, system administrators can select individual web services which interest them, then choose only the fields necessary from these web services. Also, unlike many of the base product screens which split various web services across different tabs, web service prompts can describe screens with multiple web services all on the same page. This allows a task comprised of several logical steps to be accomplished on a single screen.