I make my share of enhancement requests and submissions to the Top Ten forum. But there's one particular PDM related one where I have repeatedly run into the problem driving that request and I'm at the point where I want to plead with the User Forum to help give it more visibility:
Addition to Transition Conditions: Group Membership
(I'll go on a rant on this below, but all PDM admins I'd encourage you to go to both of those links and add some likes and comments and drive the kind of engagement that SOLIDWORKS historically has responded well to)
For transition conditions, we can only account for Category, Filepath, Object Type, Revision, Child Reference States, and Variable Values. If we want to restrict permissions based on those conditions in addition to Group membership, our only solution is to create a redundant transition.
My company has multiple defined "approval roles" for different parts of our product design structure. Five distinct teams that are responsible for reviewing and approving specific aspects of our overall assemblies. I need six different Release transitions to account for this. One for each of the approval teams, along with the filepath/variable conditions that apply to each team, then a sixth one for the "null" condition (any engineer can approve any file that doesn't fall into the purview of those five teams).
If I could include "Group Membership" as a condition (as well as having an AND operator in addition to the OR operator), I would be able to replace all six of those transitions with one single transition.
Note that I'm talking about something very different from a Parallel Transition, where we need representatives from different groups to sign off on a transition (as if this were an ECN signoff). I want to be able to modify the conditions for a transition based on the group membership of the user.
There are other similar situations that I can guarantee without question are very common among PDM implementations throughout our user community. These situations add wasteful redundancy in many workflows. If you have a component that is stocked or subject to a regulatory agency, how can you restrict the ability to start a revision to a specific group? You need redundant transitions: one for IsStock/IsRegulated = Yes only available to specific groups, one for IsStock/IsRegulated = No available to your full team.
There are other enhancements that I've been requesting for longer that this one (ask me about Named Entities and Drawings). But this has been a shortcoming in PDM since I was first trained in it 15 years ago. And as my company moves past its first phase of PDM implementation, I am reminded time and time again why this really should be addressed as a feature enhancement.
