Converting task to child WO: WOCLASS remains as 'ACTIVITY' (incorrect)

Summary:
Converting task to child WO: WOCLASS remains as 'ACTIVITY' (incorrect)

Details:
The IBM docs say: "You can easily convert any task to a child work order with tasks of its own."
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/work-order-operations-are-now-tasks-overview-and-faq

Also: Enabling tasks as work orders

A task can be converted to a child work order by either applying a Job Plan to a task or by adding a task to the task.

Problem:
When a task is converted to a child WO, only the ISTASK field gets updated, not the WOCLASS field. The WOCLASS field remains as 'ACTIVITY', but it should be automatically changed to 'WORKORDER', since it is now a work order.

We were under the impression that WOCLASS was a reliable field. We use it for countless custom lookups, reports, queries, etc. But now it seems like WOCLASS can have incorrect values. This compromises our existing queries, which is concerning.

RFE:

Could IBM please modify Maximo so that when tasks are converted to WOs, the WOACTIVITY is set to WORKORDER, not ACTIVITY?

From IBM Support:

TS006181298

Nov 04, 2021, 11:50

We were discussing with product designer about this issue that you reported, and after investigating it, he mentioned this is working as expected because Maximo will not change the original class of the record in this scenario. What Maximo does is remove the "istask" flag when a task becomes a parent of another task. Then he suggested delete the erroneous task and enter a child work order.

It could be considered as an enhancement on the product (not a bug), which means that this functionality is not currently present in Maximo, and that this cannot be fixed on the current version since the fix would require changes to the product architecture.

However, we understand your point and we see there is room for improvement.