EdBundy - Thursday, August 2, 2012 4:31 PM:
Good day all
This may be an exceedingly obvious question, but what is the default workflow that should be associated with the Item Type "Part"? ECRs, PRs, etc. all have life cycles and workflows associated, but it seems that Parts don't. Is there a workflow that can be adapted to use with parts - we are only now coming to the full review/release workflow test and having all promotions done by "Aras PLM" w/o a workflow is not going to cut it...
Thanks in advance,
Ed
Brian - Monday, August 6, 2012 6:19 PM:
Hi Ed,
Parts and Documents don't have a workflow. Their lifecycles are driven by the ECN, ECO, DCO processes.
To release a part (not including manual release) you add the part to a Change - ECO, DCO, etc. (pick one)
Then you progress the change and at the end the Part/Document has been released.
When you want to change a Released Part or Document you add these to a Change and progress the change. At the "Edit Item" or "Draft Changes" activity of the Change workflow you will find that the Released Part/Document has been promoted to In Change and a new Revision of the Part/Document is created at Preliminary.
Hope this helps.
Brian.
EdBundy - Tuesday, August 7, 2012 8:17 AM:
Hi Brian
Thanks for the info, it helped a lot. I saw this on another forum post but apparently I didn't delve deep enough into Aras' item types because I couldn't find anything operating on the Part and Document item types. So I still have some way to go. However the Matrix in the express ECO is extremely useful, and is beyond what the previous PLM that I worked on had. So thanks for the redirection :-)
While on this topic, I do not wish to open another thread for something related:
The matrix allows me to make changes to products (including assemblies and parts), and I can get released assemblies to go up a revision and go to state "Prelim" for editing - is there a way to check-out an assembly + all lower-level BOM items (i.e. check out assembly + associated files)? As it stands at the moment, I have to manually check-out each item for editing individually...
This is a bit off-topic but would be handy in the long run.
Thanks again,
Ed
Brian - Wednesday, August 8, 2012 9:52 PM:
Hi Ed,
There is no method for adding all of the BOM items to a change from the change matrix.
If you consider that most of the time changes are driven from the component/sub-assembly up then you normally know which of the lower level items need to be changed and what can be a mystery is what Assemblies they belong to up to the highest level assembly items.
I would consider it rare that you would want to edit all of the components of an assembly + their associated drawings when you are reving the assembly item.
You could create a search under parts (using the Advanced search or AML Search) that returned all of the child items in a BOM and then just select all of them in the search grid and use the "Add to change" action on the context menu.
This is what you might do if you were releasing an assembly for the first time and there were a lot of unreleased components in it.
Cheers,
Brian.
