With the introduction of the cloud offering of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, a much broader community of customers can now access vast PLM functionality, regardless of their own size or level of sophistication relative to design and engineering processes. In the area of design/engineering changes, the platform offers a number of applications that allow the user to manage change in a simple way, but grow over time into more sophisticated processes.
The platform offers three primary ways to drive change: simple tasks, project driven tasks, and change management. Let's look at each of these...
Simple task driven change - The foundational roles of the platform, namely Business & Industry Innovation, offer the majority of platform users the ability to create comprehensive task assignments for a designer or engineer to implement.
As you can see in the illustration, the initiator of the change can:
- Describe what needs to be done via a description
- Link any type of document on the platform as an attachment (generally used for specifications in the form of office documents, images, videos, etc.)
- Link deliverables to define what should be worked on
- Link context, if relevant, so the designer knows what higher design(s) are affected by the change
- Define the maturity of the task to track progress
- Track time estimation (not a popular field, but useful to those involved)
- Assign one or more users to the task so they will be notified as well as have the task included in their WIP list
Anyone associated to the change action (CA) can also create record comments which are attached to the CA and shared with the other reviewers and assignees.
With the introduction of POWER'BY on the platform, we also are introducing direct access to the deliverables/attachment from within the CAD environments, allowing the designer to work with tasks directly from within their design session.
Project-driven change - Although Collaborative Tasks gives a powerful way to convey change, it does not allow you to coordinate change in context of a larger project or timeline. The role, Project Planner, introduces a more sophisticated task that can be associated with other tasks and have dependencies to other tasks. This augments all the prior functionality of a collaborative task. It should be noted that Project Planner is a second generation, database-driven planning system and can dynamically update the timeline, driving the tasks in real-time.
Change Management - The ideal tool for managing change on the platform via a Change Action. The CA allows you to fully audit what is modified as well as track the progress through assignees and reviewers that sign-off electronically on the work completed. The CA also can automatically create the new revisions of the design as well as release it once the reviewers have accepted the changes.
To coordinate multiple changes together, CAs can be combined under Change Orders (CO) to coordinate complex change activities. Dependencies can be created between the CAs to force completion in specific orders.
Many companies will combine these approaches. For example, a product or project manager may receive issues/input from marketing and manage a project plan for a product development effort. A task may be inserted into the plan that addresses a new issue and is assigned to a lead design engineer. They will then create a CA to drive the modification request to specific staff within their department, while incorporating their expertise into the deliverables and attachments only they would know and understand.
Hopefully, you can see the flexibility the platform offers here for driving change. It can provide a wide array of approaches to the challenge of design change and let the enterprise evolve as needed in this domain over time.
Collaborative_Product_Definition_and_Release
