Introduction
This topic serves as a guide to achieving the successful adoption of implementing a formal change process, which is a core value of the SOLIDWORKS PLM Professional role. This topic is primarily focused on the Change Governance and Change Execution apps, but will also discuss complementary capabilities found in other supporting apps, where applicable. The topic expands upon the capabilities discussed in the Formal Design Release and Revise section of this guide.
The following sections outline how to approach and structure the adoption of a formal change process, working with key stakeholders in your organization.
Roles and Apps Covered in This Topic
Role: SOLIDWORKS PLM Professional (and Change Manager)
| Primary Apps | |
| Change Execution | |
| Change Governance | |
| Route Management | |
| Issues Management |
Note: The SOLIDWORKS PLM Professional role contains the same app that is found within the Change Manager (CHG) role; therefore, the workflows and capabilities discussed in this wiki will apply to companies with either.
Before You Begin – Recommended Background Learning Content
If you are new to the concept of using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform for implementing a formal change process, it is recommended that you familiarize yourself with the capabilities and recommended use cases, with the following content:
- Formal Design Change Process on the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform - SolidPractices Guide
Before embarking on any customer-facing implementation activities related to this topic, in addition to the capabilities of the Change Governance and Execution apps, you must also be familiar with the following adoption guide topics and 3DEXPERIENCE platform concepts.
- Introducing the Platform User Interface to SOLIDWORKS Users
- Organizing and Controlling Access to SOLIDWORKS Content
- Revision and Lifecycle
- Formal Design Release and Revise
Planning for Successful Implementation and Adoption
The 3DEXPERIENCE platform provides companies with the ability to implement fully traceable design and document change processes. The personnel involved in a single change process can range from a couple of people to multiple stakeholders spread across different departments.
Simply put, a business's change process requirements can be complex. In its most comprehensive form, Issues captured via the Issues Management app can drive change requests and/or change orders, and a change order can drive multiple change actions. Issues can also govern a change request that in turn governs a series of change orders, and those change orders can drive multiple change actions.
Formal change management heavily utilizes ENOVIA revision control and lifecycle capabilities. It’s recommended that all stakeholders involved in a formal change process implementation project have a complete understanding of these concepts, and ideally, will have already been using them in production.
Planning
Thorough planning is critical before starting the rollout of any new company process. Having a well-defined plan will ensure that the implementation of the new process is a success. An implementation project can be broken down into the following stages.
If you need support and guidance with planning and implementation, it is recommended that you work with your SOLIDWORKS reseller on the first project.
The first three stages represent the planning phase, followed by the project rollout, as described in the next 3 stages. The scale of each implementation will vary.
- For companies with a small number of users, the three planning stages may only require a single meeting and a couple of key stakeholders.
- For larger companies, this phase requires involvement from multiple departments. The planning stages will likely require several dedicated workshops to fully understand all of the outcomes and requirements of the company as a whole.
1. Identify the Key Stakeholders
The first step of the adoption process is to identify all of the stakeholders in your business that will be involved in the implementation project. This will vary depending on the scale of the change process.
- If you work in a highly regulated industry, it is likely that you will have dedicated people for managing design and document changes. These are sometimes referred to as change coordinators, and their overall team is referred to as the change control board.
All stakeholders who will interact with the change process being implemented must be identified, and their role in the current process must be understood. For some companies, it may only be engineers or designers (SOLIDWORKS users) who are involved; in others, it will be several people across multiple departments and disciplines, including the change control board. Involvement for some may just be awareness that a new process is being implemented, but for others, involvement will mean hands-on training and a complete understanding of the potential benefits to their business.
Finally, nominate a person or group of individuals to lead the rollout of the chosen change process and have the responsibility for making it a success. It is key to identify your internal champions who will support others and maintain momentum. In many cases, this will be the same person or people involved in making the original purchase decision. Failure to have dedicated leadership during the implementation and subsequent go-live risks the project failing to meet its outcomes. This situation will often result in people reverting to their old methods.
Below are examples of typical personas and their responsibilities for the people who may be involved in a design or document change process.
IT/CAD Administrator
| Design/Engineering Manager
| Lead Designer/Engineer
|
Manufacturing Engineer
| Test Engineer
| Change Coordinator
|
2. Align Stakeholders and Build Knowledge
It is often the case that the people who interact with change processes day-to-day are not always the same people who were involved in the decision to implement a new change process using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. Therefore, they may not fully understand the companies’ reasons for adopting this new way of working. A lack of understanding of why a new process is being implemented can lead to friction and can, at best, slow down the adoption, or at worst, completely derail it to the point where the implementation is abandoned.
The good news is that this situation can be avoided by ensuring that the stakeholders start the project with the same level of knowledge and understanding.
Establish Awareness
To ensure that all stakeholders are aligned on the value and with the same level of knowledge and understanding for why this change is being put in place, it is recommended that with the assistance of your SOLIDWORKS reseller, one or more awareness sessions be held for all users who have not yet seen how an engineering or document change process is managed using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. This awareness session will typically take the form of a product overview demonstration framed in the context of how the new solution will provide benefits over and above the company's existing workflows.
In addition to the product overview, awareness sessions should always be attended by one or more of your key project stakeholders. These people will be responsible for answering internal questions related to why the company has decided to adopt a new way of working and to help explain the expected benefits to the business as a whole.
3. Defining Clear Goals and Outcomes
To achieve a successful transition to managing a formal change process on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, it is critical to define and agree on clear outcomes with all key stakeholders.
Clear Outcomes should be defined at the start of the implementation project. Running a dedicated workshop is a great way to do this.
- When a small number of stakeholders are involved, a couple of hours may be all the time necessary to define the outcomes.
- When working with larger customers, this process may involve many stakeholders from different areas of the business; therefore, more than one session may be required to define and agree on all of the objectives and outcomes.
Any information gained during pre-sales activities with your SOLIDWORKS reseller, for example, process mapping workshops, use case definitions, and expected benefits, should also be used to help define the objectives of the implementation and be related to the three adoption levels outlined in the next section.
Likely, a business will already have one or more change processes in place. These will vary in form, from simple to complex, and from manual to fully automated.
When implementing any new process, it’s important that the users involved in the project experience value as soon as possible. Therefore, it’s important to avoid making the initial implementation unnecessarily complex. Select one change process for the pilot project. Ideally, this process is important to your business, but it should be as simple as possible.
The adoption of formal change can be split into two phases, described below.
- The first phase introduces the basic concepts related to using a change action
- The second phase builds on the first by introducing more advanced concepts of change requests and orders
Phase 1 - Basic Change Action Workflow
As described in the planning section, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform Change methodology provides a tiered level of capability from Issue Capture to raising Change Requests, Change Orders, and Change Actions.
Attempting to immediately implement a process that includes many of these capabilities will likely overwhelm most users, especially if they are new to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and only familiar with the basics of lifecycle and revision management.
In this or any situation, it is recommended that the first change process implemented is simplified to utilize just Change Actions in combination with a route that defines the approval process. The Formal Design Release and Revise topic contains an example of a basic change action workflow using the pre-configured “out of the box” behaviour.
This example represents the recommended starting point.
For small product development teams operating in industries that are not highly regulated, using Change Actions in combination with Routes can often be enough to satisfy their requirements.
Phase 2 - Introducing Change Requests and Change Orders
Once users are comfortable with working through a basic Change Action use case and have proved to be successful, the concept of Issues Management, Change Requests and Change Orders can be introduced. These concepts will be important for companies operating in highly regulated industries and will build upon the change action use case.
The graphic and steps described below provide a summary of the 3DEXPERIENCE change management end-to-end process. This example is based on making a series of design changes in SOLIDWORKS. However, exactly the same methodology can be applied to other examples within an organization for example, changes related to documentation, simulation studies, and manufacturing.
i) Change Request
A designer raises a change request in SOLIDWORKS.
ii) Formalize Request
The change request is reviewed by one or more change coordinators, and if deemed to be important, the change request is formalized. New people will be added to the request and the formal review/approval process that utilizes a Route template.
iii) Analyze
An impact analysis is undertaken. This analysis is used to identify and capture other items that will be affected by the requested change, for example, other products, drawings, documentation, etc.
iv) Complete review
All stakeholders complete their analyse of the change request, and a go/no-go decision is made on whether to proceed with making the requested change.
v) Raise a Change Order
The change board decide to go ahead with the change. A new Change Order is raised. The individual change actions needed are created, and the persons responsible are assigned.
vi) Complete the Change Actions
The designers complete the changes to the SOLIDWORKS design and submit their change actions for review.
vii) Review Change Order and Approve/Reject the Overall Change Request
Members of the change board review the respective change actions assigned to them for approval. If the approvers are happy with the completed changes, then the order and the overall change request are completed. All of the stakeholders assigned to the change request will be notified. Alternately the changed actions could be sent back for further work, and the approval process will start over again.
The Change Governance app provides the change board members with a single view of all the change items, their related objects, and the current status.
Adoption Phases Summary
For the majority of companies implementing change management using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, the intended outcome is to achieve improved efficiency compared with their current processes. Therefore, avoid attempting to replicate existing processes. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform has been tailored to provide out-of-the-box workflows based on industry best practices, as demonstrated in the two phases described above. Breaking each implementation down into these two adoption phases at the start will provide a firm foundation on which to build on later. Taking this approach will avoid unnecessary complexity. Once users are familiar with these basic concepts, more complex workflows, for example utilizing multiple change orders, can be adopted at a later date.
4. Training
Due to the consultative nature of implementing change management, user training will need to be tailored to individual change processes. Users should be trained to a point where they can implement new change processes with minimal to no assistance. This can greatly reduce the need to rely on your SOLIDWORKS reseller by creating self-sufficiency.
Training should be divided into separate sessions for setup and usage, with the relevant stakeholders attending each. It is important that user training focuses on the specific customer change processes being implemented. Delivering a generic training session and expecting users to make the jump to their own process is likely to lead to frustration and ultimately failure to adopt the new way of working.
All new change processes should be fully documented. Creating a WIKI in your 3DSwym community on your company tenant is a great way of documenting best practices and training materials specific to your processes. Capturing this information in a WIKI will also ensure that users throughout the company can find and utilize this information directly from 3DSwym or by using the AURA virtual assistant.
5. Pilot Project
Before implementing a change workflow, each workflow must be thoroughly tested and validated before going live.
- For a small team, this may only require one or two hours and could be included as part of the user training.
- For larger organisations, it's recommended that a small group of users be nominated. The group should include representatives from each department involved in the workflow.
Once the testing is complete, any changes to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform or SOLIDWORKS configuration can be made before the workflow goes live.
Following a successful pilot, it is recommended that the working practices being implemented are fully documented in a 3DSwym community as described in the previous section. This will provide a valuable resource for everyone involved to refer back to when they have questions related to day-to-day usage.
Ongoing Engagement
Following the user training and subsequent go-live, some users may hit a roadblock. Not addressing these promptly risks the business reverting to its old methods of working. Therefore, after the user training and subsequent go-live, regular check-ins should be made with the key stakeholders to ensure that the project is on track and the company is seeing value from the new process. The format of these activities will depend on the size of the project and the number of people involved; it will range in scope from a regular short call every couple of weeks to more formal in-person meetings.
It's important to build in these regular checkpoints within the scope of every implementation plan.
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