IBM® Maximo® for Service Providers delivers a suite of applications that manage customer agreements, service delivery, supplier contracts, and customer billing. Maximo for Service Providers fully supports service as a business. Maximo Service Provider meets the needs of clients who manage assets and services for customers, as a business, or clients who manage assets and services within an enterprise and bills internally for those services. Customer agreements - Maximo for Service Providers maintains the agreements that exist between a service provider and each customer. Customer agreements specify the maintenance services to perform. Each request for service is validated to ensure that the customer is entitled to the service under the requested conditions. The agreements also specify the prices to charge for these services. As maintenance activities are recorded, prices are calculated based on the pricing rules specified in the customer agreement. At the end of the billing period, all of the billing transaction are collected and added to bill batches for review. Recurring monthly charges can be billed to customers automatically through billing schedules that are part of the customer agreement. Response plans - Response plans assign the person or group to handle each service request from a customer. A response plan selects the appropriate job plan to accomplish the requested work. The response plan sends notifications about the work in process to the appropriate people so that they can identify the next steps. Customer billing - At scheduled intervals, the billing process extracts the calculated prices from work orders, tickets, and sales orders and collects them into a billing batch. Monthly bill batches are also created for recurring costs specified in billing schedules. The service provider reviews the billing batch and adjusts the prices if necessary. Customers also can view parts of the billing batch so that they can pre-approve invoices that will be generated for the billing batch. After the adjustment and approval process is complete, the bill batch is forwarded to the accounting system of the service provider to prepare the customer invoices. Security - Maximo for Service Providers uses security groups and data object restrictions to ensure that only authorized users can view information about customers. An employee of the service provider can see information relating to all of their assigned customers, but an employee of one of the customers can see only work orders for his or her company.