How does IntelliJ create artifacts from pom files?

We have a large project that uses Maven. I don't use mvn idea:idea, I just open the maven project in IntelliJ and the majority of the work is done in terms of setting up the artifacts.

Some of the artifact settings I need to do manually as the artifact set up in IntelliJ is not identical to the one created when I run mvn clean install from the command line. Every time there is a change to the pom file I need to reapply these manual settings. (It's settings for an EJB and and EAR artifact if that changes things.)

Is there any way of getting IntelliJ to do these steps for me automatically? Or is there an article that I can read about how IntelliJ generates it's ar开发者_Python百科tifact settings from the pom files?

Thanks in advance :)

[EDIT]

Just to be clear, the pom file is already being automatically imported when there are changes to it. It's the manual changes that I applied after the previous import that are lost that I would like to find out how to automatically restore.

Starting from version 10.0, IDEA can be set up so to perform re-import of changes in POM files automatically.