Introduction
Managing change during product development is one of the most complex challenges organizations face. The ENOVIA Collaborative Industry Innovator (CSV) and Change Manager (CHG) roles help product development teams orchestrate multidisciplinary change processes while maintaining a single source of truth throughout the product development lifecycle.
In this blog, you'll discover five practical ENOVIA tips to help improve the efficiency of change orchestration, reduce errors and enhance traceability.
1) Accurately Propagating Changes from Engineering to Manufacturing
Many organizations struggle to accurately propagate engineering change information across downstream departments such as manufacturing, procurement and quality. Any inconsistency in this propagation can cause teams to work with outdated or inaccurate data, resulting in rework, production delays and costly shop-floor errors.
Using the Flowdown Dependency between change actions capability, you can ensure that:
- Upstream changes are completely and accurately propagated across downstream functions. These changes are automatically populated in the Flowdown tab of the downstream change action.
- Each Upstream change listed in the Flowdown tab is thoroughly analyzed before the downstream change action can be completed.
For example:
Refer to following demo video which explains this process:
2) Using Standard Route for Change Action Approval
Most product leaders orchestrating the change process are familiar with the usage of the “Approval Route” template to manage approvals for Change Requests, Change Orders and Change Actions. However, this type of route is limited to “Approval” tasks only.
Using the “Standard Route” template provides greater flexibility. This template allows tasks with different objectives (Notify, Comment and Approve) to be arranged in any sequence, as long as at least one “Approve” task is included.
Refer to following demo video which explains this:
3) Cross-highlight Objects in the Change Action
Reviewing or executing a Change Action requires users to quickly identify the exact part being reviewed or modified. In complex assemblies, this can be difficult without a clear visual link between the objects listed in the Change Action and their position in 3D.
ENOVIA Change Management addresses this topic with the cross-highlight capability, which creates a direct connection between objects in the Proposed Changes or Realized Changes list and the corresponding item in the 3D view.
This is especially useful in two scenarios:
- Web Apps: For Approvers and Product Leads, selecting an object in the Realized Change section highlights it in the 3D viewer (3DPlay, 3D Navigator). You can also use the Focus which option reframes the geometry around it for easier inspection.
- Desktop Apps: For CAD Engineers, cross-highlighting between the Proposed Changes list, product structure, and 3D model helps ensure they are modifying the correct object in the right change context.
Refer to following demo video which explains this:
4) Enforcing 'Auto-Freeze' when CA is promoted to In Approval
When a single assignee is responsible for a Change Action with a large number of realized changes, verifying that each object is already in the Frozen maturity state and promoting any remaining objects before moving the change action to In Approval can be tedious and time-consuming.
The auto-freeze setting addresses this by automatically promoting all objects in the Realized Changes tab to the Frozen maturity state when the change action is promoted to In Approval maturity state. This reduces manual effort and accelerates change preparation for review.
Note: To enable this, your platform administrator must enable the ‘Enforcing Auto-Freeze when CA is promoted to In Approval’ setting, using the checkbox available in the Change Management tab of the Platform Management widget.
Refer to following demo video which explains this:
5) Enforcing Change for New Revision Creation
In many situations, users may create a new revision of an object manually, without linking it to a formal change process. This can weaken traceability, reduce governance and make it difficult to understand why a revision was created in the first place.
ENOVIA allows administrators to enforce new revision to be created only by a formal change process. This setting is available through the Change Management tab of the Platform Management widget.
When this setting is enabled, users can create a new revision of a change-controlled object only when the object is associated with an appropriate Change Action.
This helps ensure that:
Every new revision is formally justified through a change process. This also helps in preventing the uncontrolled or accidental revisions.
Revision history remains traceable and aligned with approved change records.
Refer to following demo video which explains this:
