Description
Key Learnings
- Learn how to create a workspace in Fusion Lifecycle
- Learn how to enable access to data aspects
- Learn how to manage access rights
- Learn how to manage workflows
Speakers
- TMTony MandatoriHigh-energy, creative engineer and PLM expert with experience in architecture, sales, and implementation of enterprise systems.
- Hagay DvirHagay Dvir is a software development manager for the Fusion 360 Manage and the Manage Extension products. Hagay has over 15 years of experience working on defining and implementing enterprise product lifecycle management (PLM) systems and has been with the Fusion 360 Manage Team for 9 years.
TONY MANDATORI: OK, so this course is Fusion Lifecycle Administration, and it's meant to be the basics of administering Fusion Lifecycle.
There are two presenters. I'm Tony Mandatori, and this is Hagay Dvir. And between the two of us, we have a lot of experience with PLM. And it should come as no surprise that we actually have experience in other PLM products as well. OK, so we know what the industry is with PLM, we've been doing it for a few years, both with this product and other products as well.
I want to get a show on the room. How many people have been implementing PLM for more than a year? OK, and more than five years? You're going to get tired.
OK, so two people more than five years. More than 10 years? OK.
So you weren't using Fusion Lifecycle if you've been doing it more than 10 years. Yeah, OK.
So, good. So we have some people with some experience with PLM. This is meant to be a basic class, so if we don't get into some of the topics that you really want to hear, please email us. Those are our email addresses, tony.mandatori@autodesk.com and hagay.dvir@autodesk.com.
The presentation and a handout is available to you. We're going to try and go through some simple demos to show specifically what the power of Fusion Lifecycle is. And what the power is, is it's really simple to get your system up and running in a very short period of time. OK?
So PLM typically-- and Joe can probably nod his head-- is expensive, it's an expensive endeavor. You don't get it right the first time, you iterate. That's kind of changing. We're kind of changing the industry with Fusion Lifecycle, and that's why we're so excited about it.
So I've been a solution architect, I'm a solution architect in the field. I'm a consultant, I do engagements, so I keep it real. Hagay is a product manager. Anything else that we should say about Hagay?
HAGAY DVIR: Yeah, I'm the senior project manager for Fusion Lifecycle. And so any questions, again, feel free-- this is my email. Just feel free to email me.
TONY MANDATORI: And the dynamics, the way it works on accounts-- I tend to talk to customers, try and get the requirements right, try and do as much as I can, and then Hagay sets me straight, right? So I say, Hagay, this is what we need to do. So OK, this is the way we strategize together on how to do things.
OK, so let's get into some of the-- so the class summary. The class summary switched a little bit. We were going to talk about Fusion Team a little bit. This is not Fusion Team at all, this is all Fusion Lifecycle, and it's going to be with the classic user interface.
The key objectives is to basically learn how to map your requirements into some workspace configuration. So with the experience I've had, I've seen certain things in PLM, and I want to share that real experience with you a little bit and show how I would configure Fusion Lifecycle if I was trying to configure it from scratch.
So the ability of creating your workspaces is pretty simple. So what I want to do is I want to show that some of the things that are pre-configured, you can use them or you can try and recreate them. It's not that difficult to recreate them.
OK, so that's what the gist of this presentation is, is really to show you how to map some requirements and expose them inside of PLM 360. Workflows, relationships, and attributes are the big ones.
So Fusion Lifecycle is all-encompassing. PLM actually is all-encompassing. When a business wants to do PLM, it's probably because they want quicker time to market. They want to get their products out there quicker and they want to have fewer defects.
So it kind of spans the entire life cycle of the product. You start with designing the product, but then even all the way to service you want to make sure that your product has quality in it, if there's defects that you track all the defects, that you have the right people communicating with each other.
So communication is the key. The reason you have this system in place is to make sure that people are talking to each other, to get the product developed quicker, to get the product improved quicker so you have a better product in a shorter amount of time.
So in the industry, what I've noticed is the reason people paid millions of dollars for their PLM implementation is because they wanted that hedge against the other company. When Boeing's designing an aircraft and it's taking them a year to develop it, Airbus is already out with a newer aircraft.
What you want to do is you want to get quicker time to market. I want to get it down to six months, I want to get it down to three months if I can. OK, that's why people pay big bucks for it.
OK, so the different aspects over here. You can see them on the page there. There's different areas of the business that are going to be affected by PLM. Eventually you want everybody communicating with each other, tracking everything they're doing in the same system.
Issue management-- I think in a previous session, we had [INAUDIBLE] talking about quick wins. [INAUDIBLE] said, try and do your implementation quickly. Try and get something out there as quick as you can, so people become comfortable with using Fusion Lifecycle. OK. So that's what we want to do. We want to start off small, but then let it grow. Let people start using it. Let people start sharing information and working with each other.
So what you're going to notice is that Fusion Lifecycle, or PLM, is going to be managing a lot of different aspects of your business. You want to get the right information to the right people, quickly. So if somebody needs to approve a change, don't clutter his inbox with a whole bunch of other changes that he needs to improve. Get him focused on that one change. OK. Then, when he clicks on that change, give him the links to go somewhere else-- go somewhere else quickly. And so that can easily be configured in a few different ways. We'll show a couple of them here.
So we talked about some of these already. I kind of wanted to show you a definition that SIM data has on what PLM is. OK. So, not a product. And that's the big thing. It's not just a product. It's a way of trying to make sure that your processes run efficiently. So I tried to highlight the major points here-- strategic business approach, and it's spanning the entire life cycle of your product. And it's the complete set of product definition.
So I think with the aircraft industry, when I worked in that, you have to supply a configuration statement for the aircraft. So you want to have everything that's on that aircraft-- so complete product definition. Then your aircraft changes before a first flight. You find some issues in it. So what you want to do is, you want to make sure that all the changes that you've made appear inside of another configuration statement that you supply. Everything that's defined for that product is something you want to put together and keep in one single system. So it's not a technology. So that's the biggest point that you want to hear. It's more of a business process. It's more about making sure that all your product data is linked together properly.
So now I'll talk more about Fusion Lifecycle. And the things about Fusion Lifecycle-- the first thing you notice when you look at the user interface is workspaces. And other products, other PLM products-- what they'll try and do is they'll try and build containers. They'll try and build containers because maybe that's the way people sort of organize data in their mind. They have a desktop. You have folders on your desktop. You try and create these folders. Those folders-- we kind of think a little bit differently. The workspace in Fusion Lifecycle is a way of defining your configuration, as well as compiling everything into a location that you can easily search.
But if we were to folder it up, what's going to happen is that you're going to start defining to people on a way to search their data. And you kind of don't want to do that. You don't want to limit their definition by saying you have to follow my folder structure. What you want to do is, you want to give it to them and then say, filter as you need. So you filter the data as you need to look for it. So instead of using folders, or instead of thinking about workspaces as a place to store your data, and then creating a whole bunch of them for different types of data, put them all in one place so that you can easily filter them.
So the workspace is a way of defining what the different types of objects that you have-- items and bombs. I might have items that serve different purposes, but I'm not going to put those different items into different workspaces just because I want to collect them together. Put them all in one workspace. We're really efficient on how we can scan through 40,000, 100,000 objects in a workspace. Use filters to narrow in on what you need.
And I'll show you a little bit of a demo how filters look like. You probably already know this, but if I look at the items in bomb workspace-- in the items in bomb workspace we have a filter defined to say, just show me bills of materials. So use your filters instead of looking to create different definitions or different locations to store your data. Some people would have said, hey, I kind of want to store my data in a different workspace. Bad idea. The good idea is, use your filters.
And the filters basically give every user the ability to look at the data a different way. So in this case, I want to search for some attribute equals to bomb. But other users might say, well, instead of doing that, I want to search for things that are assigned to me, or something else in the definition. They can easily do that with the filter definition.
So try and keep, according to the slide here-- try and keep your definition-- focus on the definition. Split up your workspaces with the different types of objects you have. Typically in PLM, change objects, change order, change request problem report and items. So these are the different types of objects that you see.
So designing a workspace-- so when I look at a workspace, I see tabs across the top. I see a bunch of fields. And there is a temptation, I think [INAUDIBLE] talked about in her lecture as well. There's a temptation to kind of go overboard. There's a temptation to put a whole bunch of attributes in there, not because you think they're really good attributes, but just because you think, well, maybe I'll use it. The idea is, try and make it look like something that you typically do. So if I have a change order, you have a piece of paper that's your change order. Typically you're trying to put a lot of the information on that one piece of paper, but it's organized efficiently.
So if you're using change orders in your industry, you've probably already organized in such a way that it looks good. Grab all those attributes. They're probably really important attributes that need to be on that page-- put 'em on your change order. Organize them in such a way that people will relate to the different sections that they're using. So that's the idea of making it simple. Don't over-convolute your your workspace with attributes you're not going to use.
If you do need to have some extra attributes for calculations, that's OK. Hide them. No need to see attributes that are purely only used for different reports, et cetera. So try and keep it as easy to use for the new user as you possibly can. Keep as few attributes that you can get away with. If you need some extra attributes for a calculation, don't clutter the interface. Try and remove them into an admin section to hide them.
There's a few different types of workspaces that we have in Fusion Lifecycle. There's six of them. And they're listed out over here. You start off by considering that there are basic objects, objects that you kind of just want to use in reference lists. Maybe a list of-- if you're doing an aircraft, ATA chapters. So a basic workspace would be something without a workflow, without the capability of revisioning. And that's the first type.
If you're adding workflow, or if you need to add workflow, you'd use the second type. So it's an object that you need to get approved-- maybe a new product introduction. That's where the basic with workflow comes in. And what it does is it builds upon your basic definition of an object with all of its tabs, to having now a new object that says, I need to put it through a set of states. That's the only difference between basic and basic with workflow.
The next type of object that we have-- let's see, which one is it? Revision controlled object. So this is kind of different from some of the other PLM products that are on the market. But the idea of a revision controlled object is no workflow, but I do have the ability to revise it from A to B to C, or from one to two to three if it's an internal design revision.
Then those objects that are in the revision controlled workspace, they have to be identified as unreleased, released, maybe under review-- something like that. So the idea is that you'd put it through a lifecycle state. And we'll talk about how to do that. But that's where the fourth one comes in. The way you move something from unreleased to released is by using a change order or a revisioning object which has the capability of moving items from unreleased to released, or from one lifecycle state to another. So there's a different concept here of lifecycle state, different from workflow state.
The two at the bottom or for managing suppliers. And they have capabilities where, if you want to identify suppliers on a sourcing tab-- if you identify a workspace as a supplier workspace, you're able to choose that supplier on the sourcing tab, and then able to see all the supplied items for that supplier on the supplied items tab. So it's some special functionality with these two over here. And you can choose whether you want a workflow or not on that supplier object. So basically your first step in defining a workspace is to say, what type of workspace do I need? Is it basic? Does it need a workflow? Is it revisioned? Or is it the object that actually goes out and does the revisioning on those other objects?
So what I'm trying to show here is that there is a main menu designer where you decide how you want your things to appear in the menu. So I didn't show the menu over here, but the menu is configured a certain way if you go to Fusion Lifecycle. In that menu you have control over what you see here. So we've called it product development in this case. And we have items and bombs. We have products. We have tasks inside this product development.
But you can change that configuration. And the way you change the configuration is by going to the main menu designer. And that's what I was trying to show you on that slide right here. So you can configure your main menu as to the order, the grouping. If it works for you, the way it is by default. That's great, but you can add more as well.
So the next thing is aspects on the workspace. So you've defined the type of workspace you wanted. And now what you want to do is you want to add different functionality to the workspace. And the one thing that, for me was kind of a surprise, is that you have the same aspects for every workspace. So you can, if you wanted to, turn on all these tabs for every single workspace. It doesn't make sense.
Some of the tasks have very specialized capabilities. So if I look at a workflow tab, for example, does workflow make sense on a basic object? That's right, no. It doesn't make sense on a basic object. Does bill of material make sense on a change order? It depends. If you're going to structure your change orders in such a way that you need parent-child change orders, where there's a mother change order and some children change orders, the change orders made up of other change orders-- that's an interesting concept, but it's not the basic definition of what we see with items and bombs. So items and bombs-- the bomb, the build material tab is going to be something that you only put on to items and bombs typically, or to maybe a product, calling up an item.
So there's specific functionality that's exposed in each one of the tabs. And you typically wouldn't turn them all on, on every workspace. But you could. So that's the way we expose functionality inside of fusion lifecycle. You turn on one of the tabs. You have the functionality inside the tab. You remove the tab, you don't have that functionality.
And some of the interesting ones that we have here-- item details. Typically on every object that I create, I'll probably have an items in details because that's the one that holds the attributes. The bomb, typically only for items and bombs. The grid-- I need some sort of a tabular notation. I need something that identifies objects in a tabular way.
So the default configuration of Fusion Lifecycle has certain workspaces predefined. And that's someone's vision. It's our vision how you could do product or PLM, product lifecycle management, in a very simple way. So it has simple workflows, some scripting involved with some of the workflows. And the functionality over here is exposed through tabs. You have bill of material exposed in the items and bombs. You have workflows exposed in the change order, et cetera. So it's the way you could do product lifecycle management. So there's some semantics on each of the pages, which we use to our benefit to actually come up with a PLM system or to build a PLM system.
So now, let's talk about the industry again. What's an item? And I tried to find out a definition for an item that would kind of make sense. And we use the word item-- it's an overloaded word inside of Fusion Lifecycle. Everything in our workspace is an item. But that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about items in which workspace here? You can't answer. Don't worry about it. The PLM item is in which typical workspace? Items and bombs. You win the prize! You know what that prize is? Respect by everybody else over here-- you got it-- including myself.
So typically when you look at an item, you typically think of an owning organization, an identifier, a revision, a name, a creation date, and some other attributes that go along with it. But those are the important ones. The owning organization-- cage code maybe. So you might want to put a cage code. Something that defines who is responsible for that item.
So typically in smaller companies we leave that out. But that's something that you could say, I have an item that I've defined, but this item is something that another company has defined. So you have this ownership concept on the item. Typically the reason we leave it out is because we're defining all our items, and those are the only ones we care about. So that's typically why we don't see it in fusion lifecycle.
Now, the other thing to understand here-- and I've seen this a few times in a lot of engagements that have gone on, is that there's a notion of a drawing or a model. And the drawing or model is not the item. The item might be very well described by an attachment that we want to put on there called a drawing or a model. But a lot of people really say that it's not the same thing.
You might have a couple of drawings that describe that item. You might have a couple of models that describe that item. There might be a relationship there that you might want to manage. So just realize that it doesn't have to be the same thing. Again, we'd like to keep things simple. So for simplicity, we'll put them on the attachments tab. But it doesn't have to go there. It could be another object which would have a relationship.
So, another thing that we want to do is, we want to kind of take away the guesswork when someone's creating an item. We want to take away the guesswork when people are using the system. So what you want to do is, you want to control what they're doing. You want to make it easy for them to use a system. They just have to hit a button, and then every attribute they see makes real sense to them. That's why you don't want to over-clutter your interface.
So the creation, the numbering, the versioning-- probably automatic. You probably want to keep that automatic and unintelligent. So that's another thing that's in the industry. Intelligent numbers-- they served a purpose way back when. And maybe they still do serve a purpose so we can put the intelligence in the number if you like. But in order to make it simple for people to use, you probably want to take that away. The versioning as well-- you probably want it to be automatic. We don't want to think about, should B come after A? Can we let people put A after B? We don't want to go into that. It's too complex. Keep it simple for the user to define.
Consistency and control-- if you change the item, we want to make sure it goes through an appropriate process where people are able to look at it and say, do I really want everyone in the company looking at this change? Does it make sense? Does it make sense to waste the time of 20 engineers in a CIB meeting for this one change or not? So you want to make sure that you go through a standard workflow.
And the last thing that you want to do is you want to make sure that people have a way of relating all the items together and all the supporting material. So they're one click away from the information. You go to the change. What are the objects on the change? What are the affected items? You're one click away.
So we have this in Fusion Lifecycle. So these are the good practices in PLM. We have this in Fusion Lifecycle. Here is an example of an item. You see the item and you see the change order on the bottom which references that item when it's being changed. It's automatically numbered. It's version controlled. And actually I think I have some animation on this slide. Yeah, there we go. Automatically numbered-- that number that came up was generated somehow.
We have version control. So on the change order, if you don't change the configuration it automatically identifies that we're going to the B version. It has a life cycle state, or a life cycle transition. So on the change order it's going to be a production revision when I go. And that's why I chose B. And it shows that this is a production released object. It has a cut-in effectivity.
We're now going to talk too much about effectivity, but this is super important. When you're looking at an item structure, you want to know, how does it look on this day? The date that I'm looking at the bill of material, there's a context there. So we have the cut in effectivity. Whenever something is released or created through a change order, the version is created. We have an effectivity date that cuts it in.
So Fusion Lifecycle items-- I think you might have seen a piece of this in Brian's presentation . We copy off each other. We like each other. But the idea is that there's a certain hard-coded revisioning scheme inside of Fusion Lifecycle. We do this to make it easy. Again, we don't do this to make your life difficult. We think that alpha indicators, A, B, C, they kind of mean the big release, the real release that you want to ship to customers. One, two, three, that's kind of the internal releases. It's kind of ready for some things but not ready for other things. And then we have a working state where we see what the next version of the object is going to look like. If we want to change some attributes, it's available to us to change right away. So that's the versioning scheme.
In automatic mode, it can't be changed. So some customers say to me, well, I want to automatically assign the next version. And I don't want it to be off. I want it to be numeric. We don't do that. We want to keep it consistent. But you can switch to manual mode. And then in manual mode you can identify manually what that revision is going to be. So this is probably stuff you already know, but I'm just recapping it here.
So I also wanted to say, typically the type of attributes that I don't see in the Fusion Lifecycle definition or the default definition that I want to add-- and those typical attributes-- part type, whether it's an assembly or component. We have classification. So we can do it that way. But sometimes you want to put that in and attribute just to make some of your other scripting a little bit easier. The source, whether it's make or buy. Again, you can argue on whether that one's needed or not. Typically the ones I see though.
So typing, again, we talked about the different ways that you can type objects. The first one we said, don't do it. Don't try and put them in different workspaces just because it's a bill of material and you want to identify or segregate your bills of material another way. The other way you have that you can do this is classification. And the classification-- we have the classification baked into Fusion Lifecycle now where you can choose a classification and then extra attributes can be added on the object after you choose the classification. I think I have a slide on it. We're not going to really get into too much more than talking about it in this presentation.
And then you have a type attribute. So quite simply, you can give it a type attribute. And the way the old style classification works is it's a filtered list of types. And you can filter in. We will talk about filters a little bit more-- filtered lists. We'll play with that a little bit.
The last point on this slide-- again, super important. The reason we don't recommend trying to move things into separate workspaces for different typing is because they're generic holding areas. It's for our definition only. The view filters are what you use to narrow in. So again, concentrate on your view filters. It'll make your life a lot easier. Put everything in the same workspace for the same type of items. Put them in the same workspace, typically if you can.
And what's this? Oh, this. Is good. This is going to lead into the demo that we're going to play with a little bit. And this is an example of using a view filter. And I was talking about aircraft stuff before. Aircraft usually uses ATA chapters to define the different areas of the airplane. And typically you have different engineers working on the different areas of the aircraft. If I'm a propulsion expert, I wouldn't be working on wings. I'd be working on engine of cells maybe, or something like that. So that's where I was trying to give you the concept of using a view filter in the context of this ATA example.
Another thing before we get into the demo is permissions and security. And I was talking to Joe about this a little while ago. But the way you define permissions-- we have a certain rigid structure inside of Fusion Lifecycle. And what I try to do is I try and put it in Excel. And in order to communicate it to people I try and give them an idea of the way I'm going to define things, and help get them to help me out with the definition.
Again, as administrators in the system, getting those requirements and trying to communicate well on the requirements with users that have never seen the system is really, really difficult. This is the way I do it. I have an ACL matrix. And across the top is going to be roles, all the time. So whether you're looking at this one or this one, the differences is roles. What do you see that's different between the two sides here? I kind of give it away at the top here. Across the top is always roles, but what's different about these two spreadsheets? Don't all speak at once.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TONY MANDATORI: Group versus permissions. Yeah, I kind of gave it away. But over here, one thing that I noticed in PLM 360 is I have really discreet permissions. I have about 70 of them. So for a given role, not only can I create, read, update, delete, but I can create, read, update, delete on every tab that I have inside the workspace. So I have tabs-- the aspects of the workspace. And I can decide who can see the tab, who can update on that tab. And that's what permissions are.
What I try to do is I try to spell out some of the ones that are out of the box. Actually this was an implementation I was working on. So in another one-- we'll use another one for the example that we're going to demo. But the idea over here is that typically we have a read-write role for a given workspace. Really, really subtle here. But I have read-write, not on everything, but for a specific workspace. So I have a role. My roles are specific to workspaces. And I think Brian-- again, he showed this in his. But he really didn't narrow in on that point.
In that point though, for that role, for that workspace, I have certain permissions that I can do. And I have people that can write or read-write, and people that can only read. And the difference is, which permissions I turn off for the different users. Now, I want to group those into groups. And what I typically see in the out-of-the-box product-- and what I don't like doing is that people try and equate the two. They try and equate a role to a group. Well you're not taking full advantage of that if you're doing that.
What you really want to do is you want to create an everyone group. To make your life easy as administrators, when somebody is hired in the company, I just want to throw them into the everyone group. Everyone gives him the ability to see the data. He's internal. He's OK. We can trust him. So let him see all the data that he needs to see. And maybe if I don't want to show him every one, because it's too much, it's overwhelming, well that everyone group can remove a couple of those workspaces so he doesn't see those workspaces because he might get confused.
Maybe I don't want the quality guys seeing some of the stuff that the engineers are doing. OK, no problem. Then what I'll try to do is by function. So I'll try and say, OK, now if I am someone that's doing document control-- actually that's a bad one. But if I'm an engineer, what do I need to see? And in this case engineers need to see the change order, and they need to see drawings, but they really didn't need to see this other stuff-- [INAUDIBLE]. They didn't need to see that, so I'll hide it from them. They didn't need to update it. So they only need to update these two objects.
So you have read-write on both the change orders and the drawings, but because they're part of everyone as well, they get the read permissions. Make your life easier. There's a different way that I could have done this, which you typically see in the out of the box product which is, I can create groups that are exactly the same as the role. But I'm handcuffing myself. I'm kind of going down a path that's going to be difficult to administer. So use your groups to kind of make life easier for you, is what I'm trying to preach here. OK, I'll get off my soapbox. But I hope you kind of understand these graphs that I was putting together. And we'll use them a little bit later as well.
The other real cool feature about Fusion Lifecycle is the ability to import from the UI. And yeah, it's got a couple of glitches, or a couple of limitations. One, it's a single workspace. You can't import across multiple workspaces. I can't import a change order and then tie all the items to it as affected items. I can't do that in this interface. But what I can do is I can import items extremely quickly. So this is your quickest way of importing. So if you're doing a data migration, what you want to do is use your item import functionality inside of Fusion Lifecycle as much as you can. Once you do that, it'll quickly get your stuff in there. And then tie the relationships together using your scripting, using your API, whatever convenient way that you define on your project. But this is super important that you try and use this as much as you can, because it's quick. Yes, sir.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TONY MANDATORI: Not like this. How do you import attachments, Joe?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TONY MANDATORI: That's right. And that's currently the only way of doing that. And is that going to change with Fusion Team? Yeah, you bet it's going to change. You're going to have to update your code. But that's a discussion for another day. Good question though. Thanks for asking. So you cannot import attachments through this UI.
So now, since we talked a lot, it's time for me to sit down, take a break, maybe do a demo. So what I want to do is I want to get to a workspace that I haven't done anything to. And this is my PL2207 workspace. And as you see here it's got the basic configuration. And what I want to do is I want to build something like this to hold my ATA chapters. And so earlier on we talked about what ATA chapters were. And ATA chapters were a way of dividing out the areas of the aircraft. I have a spreadsheet that I'm going to try and import. And this is going to serve as reference data for another example that we're going to do later on.
So the point of this demonstration is just to show you how simple it is to create a workspace. And hopefully I don't get it wrong. But again, typically when I go through demonstrations, the demonstrations-- I'll miss something, and that's OK. Typically as administrators you'll miss something too. But just to make sure that I have completeness in this and that I don't miss anything. And Hagay's going to stop me if I do anything wrong. New workspace. We'll call it ATA. Yeah, we'll say ATA.
And what kind of workspace do I need? Do these things need a workflow? Probably not. So I'm going to say, basic workspace. And I'm just going to save that. So that's the first step complete. I created the workspace. And that was the workspace settings tab. Now I'm going to go to the add in details tab and I'm going to add in a section.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TONY MANDATORI: Yes, but, what don't you get when you do that?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TONY MANDATORI: Ah. Thanks. OK. So the question was, can I add workspace workflow later on? So when I create a workspace, and I create it as a basic workspace, can I add workflow later on? The answer is, no you can't. And there's a good thing to note about that. If you think that you're going to need a workflow later on, all the objects that you create in that workspace before you convert it to a workflow-- a basic workspace with workflow-- will never, ever, ever, ever, ever get a workflow state.
So those objects will exist-- without workflow, the ones that you've created-- so just to be clear, the objects that you created before you went to basic workspace with workflow will never get a workflow state. So if you think that your workspace might need a workflow in the future, create it with a workflow right away.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TONY MANDATORI: It's not really data corruption it's just that what's happening behind the scenes I think is that-- and Hagay can correct me here, but behind the scenes that I think what is happening is that these objects are being initiated and they're just not pointing to the workflow that they need to. So we'll never have one. It's not the type of object that are being created. Then you change the workspace. It says, OK, all the new objects that you create are going to get workflow. They're going to get that extra piece whenever the object's created. It's going to have that extra piece of code that runs that it links it to a workflow. So it's not really a corruption, it's just missing.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TONY MANDATORI: Yeah. No, it's bad. It's bad, you're right. So is it corruption? I'll say no because I'm a happy guy and I'll try and mull things over. But yeah, these objects really should have a workflow state and they don't. So that's why, if you ever think that the objects will absolutely need a workflow state in the future, create one. Create it with workflow. It doesn't hurt to have a workflow and then hide the tab. That doesn't hurt.
If you do it this way-- the reason I'm using this one is because I don't need it. I don't think I'll ever need it. So it might be a bad idea. You might choose as a strategy for your administration to say, every object will get a workflow bar none. That's OK too. Go ahead, do it. I didn't choose to do it here but it's a good point. Thanks for bringing it up.
You kind of threw me off a little bit but I think I can recover. Section, number, chapter-- I think I want that. So I'm going to have section. And we're not going to get too fancy here. We're going to make 'em all single line texts. And section, maybe a about 50, just to make sure I have enough. Step one complete. Add field. And I think I made this one an integer so we'll do that here.
Field length-- I don't think I need more than five. So what you should be seeing here-- this is super simple. Had to do this in another product-- wouldn't be this simple. I'm not trying to sell you anything, just saying. As an administrator, I like it. This one should be longer. This one's got to be like 100, because some of those are really long chapters. So one thing you've got to remember to do is, save your layout.
Now, will I see it in my menu? Not yet. If I update my page, will I see it in my menu? Not yet. What have I forgotten to do? Somebody other than Joe, because he's going to talk all day long if I let him.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TONY MANDATORI: Turn it on. Access control, that sounds better. OK, good. System configure-- ah, security. I always get that wrong. So, I need to create some roles. And what I'm going to do is, I'm going to create a new role. Not new user. What am I doing? New role. And I'm going to follow the convention with ATA read. Again, the role is specific to a workspace. Subtle here, but you've got to keep in keep that in mind.
Create role and add permissions. So the only permission that I really need here-- for the read guys, they've got to be able to view it. That's it. They've got to be able to view items. That's all I want them to do. Now, I need a read-write. Right So I need to give the administrators a way of actually making changes here. So ATA, read-write.
And you can argue with me that, you know what, it's probably only read. We have a convention of always using read-write, so I'm just going to follow it. And with these guys, not only do I want to view the items-- and I probably don't have to do that because I'll put myself in that everyone group as well. But I'll definitely need to add, edit, and delete items.
And for all the users that are defined, I want to create a group. Like I said, a good practice. A new group, let's call them everyone. Create and add users to the group. Yeah, there's only two people in here. We'll add 'em both.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TONY MANDATORI: They're additive. Yeah. So there's no way of doing negative permissions inside this product. Why? Because we want to keep it simple. So, yeah, no negative permissions here. If I'm a member of multiple groups, I get everything. Combine it all together. Use that to your advantage. Again, I'm stressing that again. Use it to your advantage because what's going to happen is, it's going to simplify your administration.
Does a guy need to be changing items? OK, if he does, I'll put him in the engineers group or something. I'll make sure that I try and identify what his role is. I'll talk to him, say, what exactly were you hired to do? And I'll get you to that point over there. So again, the question was, are the permissions additive? Yes, they are. When you're a member of one group you get all those permissions. There's no subtractive permissions. You threw me off again. But OK, I can recover.
So we create a group. Did we create a group? Everyone group. Yeah, my everyone group. So I added users, but as Joe pointed out-- thank god Joe's here. Because I want everyone to have read. I don't want them to have read-write, just want them to have read. They've got to be able to see it. Admins though, OK, roles.
Got to have him to be able to read-write, because he's got to be able to administer it. Added my user, added the roles. I think I've got everything. Let's hit the button, see if it works. Main menu. Where is that guy now? Well, what's he doing there? Kind of don't want him there. All right, not a problem. Main menu designer. Where are you? Let's put you in the right place. OK.
I put in a referenced workspace. Well, maybe I wanted to add a category. Maybe I'll call it aircraft example. Maybe I want to put him here instead. I don't know. It looks like an aircraft here. Not much. Problems-- I like that one. Put him over here. Save layout. Clickity click, boba trick. ATA. So what's happening here is I put it in its own group. Because it's the only one in the group, it appears by itself. When we create another one, you kind of play with this example a little bit more. We'll add more to there.
The other piece of this is, I want to do an import. Now, I'll go to imports and I'll say, can I import to that workspace? Why not? I didn't give the permission to import items. So we're going to play around with that a little bit. Going to go to security, go to my role for my admins, and I want to grab that permission to import items. And I'll look and look and look. Run imports. I want to be able to run imports on this workspace. Save that.
And now I have an Excel spreadsheet. Now, if I update my interface-- and that's something that you'll see me do quite a bit here. I'm refreshing the user interface so that I can get the menus to regenerate for performance. The menus aren't going to regenerate all the time. They're only to regenerate when you refresh the page.
So now go to my tools, run an import. It should be here. Thank god it's there. Let's choose a file. It brought me to the right place as well. So I've got my spreadsheet here. I've chosen the file. I'll say import ATA chapters. OK. So I have an ATA section. That should probably go into section. I have ATA number. I have a number attribute that will probably go into number. It won't use ATA number. And then I'll use the full chapter to go into the ATA chapter. So that's the way I think I want it.
Now, if I had items in the workspace-- what I've done is I've clicked on, I've exposed this other second dropdown menu here. If I had items in that workspace, I could match on those items. And what do I do when items exist? Again, I don't, but I'm just going to do this just for demonstration purposes.
For new records, add to the workspace. For matching records, update the workspace. And for new [INAUDIBLE] values, I like to say error, because I don't want the system to do anything I don't know that it's going to do. But that's just the way I work. I'm going to say save. As soon as I say save-- I've got problems. Oh no. Matching columns cannot have duplicates in the destination workspace. Matching columns-- this is the wrong one. Why did I do that? OK. And you guys didn't stop me.
This is the one that you need to match on. Or let's say match on this one, the unique one. Let's save on that. And I think I might have messed up the data by doing a sort, so I'm going to cancel out of here and I'm going to redo it. So I'm going to-- items, details, choose file. We're going to do this again. I'm going to say, test two. Yep, buddy.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TONY MANDATORI: I probably could have. Thank you. That's the new functionality that Brian talked about. I'm kind of a purist, you know, kind of like to do things from first principles. So just wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing anything. Match on that one. So, could I have done a clone? Yeah I can. I can do a clone as well. Chapter-- here we go. Now, hopefully I got it right this time so I don't burn too much time in this demo. I can get through the class. Oh no. OK, let's do a save. You better not be red this time, I swear. OK, great, no problems. Now I can run it. Run. 77 items to import.
Now, how do you get out of this interface? Hit cancel. It brings you back to the previous screen, tells you that it was done. There's the clone function that Joe was identifying. So this was done. I can go to my ATA workspace now and I should be able to see records in the ATA workspace. Did I import it to the wrong workspace?
No, they're there. Hold on, let's take a look. So the administrator did something wrong. We're going to take a look and we're going to see what we did wrong. So let's go back to our imports and ATA. Yeah, it imported. Ah, you know what, my view isn't defined I bet. No. I did not select a descriptor. But let's update this view. Item descriptor-- that's right.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TONY MANDATORI: That's right. That's why you guys are here. Yeah. There we go. That's why there was no record. So this actually brings up a good point. I'm glad I got into this issue. The idea is that, if I don't have any records that match with those fields-- so field was empty. There's no records for that field. It doesn't show me anything. Kind of weird. If I had shown an object here that had more than one record-- like I show grid items, I won't have 77. Let's say all of these objects had two grid items and 77. Quick math-- how many objects would I had if I had two grid elements for each one?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TONY MANDATORI: At least 140, right? Yeah. So two each. I'd have 140 records displayed here.
HAGAY DVIR: 154.
TONY MANDATORI: There you go. Hagay gets the prize. He gets my respect. But yeah. So it depends on the fields that you have here.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TONY MANDATORI: Say that again. Sorry.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TONY MANDATORI: Were joking? OK, good. You get another prize. OK. OK. But yeah. So it's a good point. So I'm glad I had that issue. I didn't set the descriptor, which is an issue. We're going to do that now.
The other thing that came up though is that nothing matched because the descriptor was empty. I didn't have any valid descriptor values so it doesn't show me anything. Interesting. But what that's good for is that if you had grid elements that you wanted to show in this filtered view as well, you can show all the grid elements and it would multiplex, I guess is the right word. It will multiplex the values here so that you have 154 items on the the workspace filter view.
So we've got to correct that instability in the system. We'll go to our Workspace Manager, which is where all our work is done. Oh, and lo and behold, you guys are so right. And I'd say the descriptor is going to be-- you know what, number, section. Yeah, maybe that's not the way it's supposed to go. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, number, section, chapter. Yeah, let's see how that looks.
So a little bit of repetition there. 92 powerplant, 92 electrical system installation. And I can change that around so each record would have this as its identifier. I can change this around in the workspace.
Oh, what am I here for? The descriptor. I can remove 'em, so I just see number. And you'd get something that looks like that. So that's going to be a reference workspace that we're going to use later on. And that's what that demonstration was for.
So we're going to get back into discussion now, and then I'll get back to a little bit more demonstration a little bit later on. What we're trying to show here is that the item details page can be broken up a few different ways. It can have classification on it. It can have owner and change information on it, which is a section which says who created it, who modified it. What it can also have is sections. Well, you need a section in order to add fields.
What you can have inside the section is you have matrices. And then the matrices can have the fields inside of it instead. If you have a matrix, the one thing to remember is it's all static content. You have to define a field for row one column one, field for row two, column two, field for row one column two, row two column one. OK. You get what I'm saying. Each one of those blocks are different fields. So keep that in mind.
It's probably a bad idea though. So you're matrices are fun. It's a nice way of viewing the object. But it takes time to draw those matrices. So I've heard from colleagues that they've overused this. Or that on initial implementations customers have overused this. When you overuse this, what happens when it's displaying that page?
Does anyone have that experience? It slows down a little. Right? Yeah, someone's nodding their hand. Yeah. It slows down a little. So don't overuse that. If you want to organize things into nice matrices-- I've done it before as well. It's great, especially with those [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE] objects where I have things that I've got to communicate to people. It's all got to be on one page. What do I do? I create a print view. Create an advanced print view.
You can organize it the way you like you. Can take your time to make it look pretty, use the right fonts, et cetera. But doing it on the item details page-- probably not the best place to do it, if you're going to organize things into matrices. Just keep that in mind as administrators. You want to keep things, again, simple for the end user all the time. He goes to the page, he systematically looks through to see what he's got to update.
An example of the item details page-- avoid overloading an item unnecessarily to improve performance. So again, don't display all the attributes if they don't need to see all the attributes. Try and hide them down to just the ones they have to see. It will be easier for them to see it.
Don't overdo it. Limit the use of advanced functionality. We'll talk about that advanced functionality in just a minute. Use picklists to avoid data error. There was another session where somebody had asked that. He says, should we use picklists? Absolutely. Use them as much as you can. People can still do the type ahead inside the picklists. And they can make sure that they get the right detail. Matrices are not tables-- again, static content.
So some of the functionality-- I think I skipped two slides. I'm just going to go back one. Some of the functionality inside of item details page. You can add classifications. We'll talk about what those are. You can have filtered picklists. You get one workspace. And you have that duality, that cascading list of attributes. Super hard to do in other products by the way. I've done it, and it was hard. Really simple over here. You have a workspace. You filter down to the record you want by adding multiple picklists for that workspace.
Computed fields-- I need to store calculations. I need to store some sort of a calculation that's going to make it easier for me to get data in another workspace? Great, use your computed field. We'll show an example of that in the next demo.
Advance section permissions-- I think Joe uses this a lot where what he does is he says, I want to make sure that only the people that I say that can update a certain area of that item details page, only they can have the ability to update that area I. Can do that with advanced permissions. And that kind of overrides that thing that I said before is that, you can override the definition. You can actually restrict permissions in a certain location of the form by using that advanced permissions. So use that as much as you can.
And then use scripting when you need to add advanced capabilities that are not covered by a built-in concept. That happens a lot. But it's on a per case. Like if I need to maybe do something on a workflow action, or I need to calculate an attribute a certain way based on some other related attribute, maybe a description based on classification-- that's a good example we use all the time-- then I would use that. I would use scripting to come up with a description. I want on my capacitors named whatever the capacitance is, micro [INAUDIBLE] blah, blah, blah, and give it the full description. Electrolytic, maybe put in something about the type of the capacitor. I'll use a script to get me that information.
So this is some things that you can take away with classification. We have a way of defining classification. I know it's hard to see. You'll have the slides. Let's see if I have that thing running where I can do a control 1. Oh yeah, that's beautiful. So that's how you define the classification. OK. You can define this complex structure. And then at each node in the structure you're adding attributes. And then the way you put it on the object over here, you can simply add the classification attribute. What that does is it creates a section. And inside that section will have all the attributes that you've defined for that inside your classification manager. I'm not going to demo that-- pity, pity. Don't have that much time.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TONY MANDATORI: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TONY MANDATORI: You got two for one-- lucky guy. You got one on the item details page. You got one on your classifications. Hallelujah, you've got both of them.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
TONY MANDATORI: Well, it is for me. Or it's obviously a problem for you, right? Because you don't want that, right? So I was kind of joking around there. But yeah, ye you hit it on the head there. You're going to have two attributes and they're going to be out of sync. They might be out of sync, which is going to be bad. So choose where it's supposed to go.
Should it be in your classification? You're the administrator, right? You're trying to define how you want your system to look. Should it be a classification attribute or should it be an attribute that's on the object? We talked about a couple of good attributes before-- source, make by, part type, assembly component-- where should it be? I don't know. Depends on your business. Define it right. Good question though.
So what are we doing here? Ah. So this is something that I get asked all the time. And I kind of wanted to put it in here. It's kind of out of place, so I apologize. But the thing that I was trying to identify here was that when I'm defining filtered picklists, I have this notion, especially if I'm doing items in bombs workspaces where some people say, I always want to see the latest in this picklist. OK, that's great.
But depending on how you define it, you might find yourself in an anomaly where it doesn't get updated properly. So the way we define the latest-- there's a little touchy point here that the way you define your dropdown and your attributes have to match. So if you have a latest version picklist, you've got to make sure that your attribute is defined as the latest version as well. Or else, when you're updating it, it's not going to have the functionality that you typically expect.
There's another piece of this that extends, is that, why doesn't it have that functionality? When we say it's latest, we usually point to the first revision in that lineage, which is the A version. The first full revision in the lineage is what we point to on the internal sides when we have the latest version picklists. So if you see that that's not working, this is a slide to come back to in the future If if have some issues there. Call me up as well. Send me an email. I'll help you out. So that's the notion of the latest picklist. It's great. It's super powerful. It gives me what I want to need, but you've just got to be making sure that you actually set it up correctly.
Another thing I ran into-- sometimes you're defining your data, you define your workspace and say, OK, I got it all working. And then somebody adds like over 1,000 records to the workspace. You go to your picklist and not all the records are there. Your picklist shouldn't be more than 1,000 entries. If you have a dropdown style picklist, it'll stop at 1,000. So use a search filter instead. OK. Use multi-select with search filter. So keep that in mind. Yeah, go ahead.
HAGAY DVIR: I'll just point out this is not kind of the behavior we want the system to have. This is more of what we would consider a bug. But there is some really good technical reasons why it's that way. So it's going to take us a little bit of time to take out that bug. So keep it in mind.
TONY MANDATORI: Yeah. I remember, I defined a system once in the past. And this is when we had an on premise system. So I know you're saying it's a bug, but I defined a system once where it scanned for all the users in the system. Whenever it went to a product, it was supposed to have a selection for the product manager. That would take down the system every time someone opened that dropdown. So I don't consider this a bug. This is just the way the system works. So it's a reason why we limit it down to 1,000, and it's because you're going to have performance issues if you have more than 1,000 in that picklist. So thanks a lot, Hagay.
Derived fields-- the idea of derived is that typically when I'm looking at an object, I have to see the attributes that are in the other workspace. And I think Brian gave a great example the other day. It said, I choose a, customer I need to see the customer details right on that page. Maybe I want to report on them. Maybe they aren't the attributes that I'm going to actually display right away.
But I want to put them somewhere, maybe in an admin section so I can use them later on. [INAUDIBLE] is another example, how it builds that nice pretty length that says, this is the link to the item somewhere in [INAUDIBLE]. It actually has the description that it generates as well as the link inside administrative attributes. Then it puts that together as a computed field. And that's the only one that's displayed.
So derived fields-- the idea of derived fields is, you're trying to get something in the other workspace to be brought back so that you can use it later on or so that you can show the user. Address, phone number for a customer-- things like that you probably have in a customer workspace and you want to bring 'em back. That's what the graphic is trying to depict. I think it does a good job at depicting it. And that's about it.
Filtered picklists-- I think, again, Brian had a great example. He's got these great examples. We used the ATA chapter. We'll use that in the future. He had one that was really bigger. It was like 42,000 postal codes in the United States. Well I'm not going to search through all of those. Maybe I'll type in the postal code if I know it. Or you call them zip codes here, right? Not postal codes. Yeah. So 47805 I think it was [INAUDIBLE], or 48705. I get the middle numbers wrong all the time.
But the idea is that you can type that in and it'll tell you exactly what it is with the filtered picklist. But more importantly, I can say Michigan, I can say [INAUDIBLE] and it'll narrow the list down for me. That's what the filtered picklists are. So the idea is to-- you can use these filtered picklists to narrow in on large amounts of data so that your selections are easier to manage. OK. Did I go up? Yeah, I got to go down. So what are we doing here? Demo! Fantastic.
So what I want to do is I want to create something that's a little bit more complex. I want to create a revisioning workspace. And I'm going to put a few attributes inside this revisioning workspace. And we'll see where we take it from here. Oh, yeah, so I want to have-- I'll do my little control one again. So what you see here is, in this example the CO that I'm going to do for aircraft-- what I want to do is I want to color attributes a little bit differently. So over here, seven days left. And I obviously did this on November 1st. One day over. So the idea is, I want to have that calculated attribute as well. So I'm going to show how to do that. And I create a few notes for myself on the configuration and the way I expect to see the configuration. So that's the calculation that I'm going to use. And we'll see if we can put that into a little demo here.
So let's create our workspace again. So Workspace Manager. And this time we're going to create a new workspace. And we're going to call it Aircraft Change Orders. Must've done this before. Kidding. Revisioning type workspace, because it's going to be something that acts on the revision controlled items. I'm going to save that configuration.
Now as we pointed out before, I've got to define something for a workflow that I can modify later on. So that workflow is going to be pretty important. I'm going to define a simple workflow right now, just so that I have something in there. And we're going to have two states. So here we go. We're going to call this one create. And we'll call another one complete.
And we'll have to tie them together or else some functionality is going to break. And we're going to say, initiate. Did I see something wrong here? Yep. And we'll say, permission is-- OK, so we submit. So then we'll have over here-- and I'll just use the same one. Oops.
And we'll say promote. No, we'll call it submit. And I know they don't make sense right now, but don't worry. We're going to come back to this later on in our third example. So we've defined the workflow.
Item details tab-- here's where the magic happens. So, add a section. And in that section I'm going to have a field. And what were the fields that I wanted again? Priority. This time I want to use something a little bit more advanced. I want to use a picklist. And the picklist-- I'm going to try and reuse one of the ones I already have. It's low, medium, high. I just saw it. So that's already in the workspace. I can use it, make a single selection. I can use radio buttons-- whatever I would like.
I need to have a size display width. No problem. We'll say five. Great. Got priority in there. You didn't need by day. Needed by. So as I type, it's automatically giving me what the internal name is. And this time I'm going to select a date field. Nothing special on the date field. Just call it needed by over here.
Now days left-- this is the one that's going to be funky. So I'd say at a field called days left. And it's going to be a single line text. And it's going to be a computed field. Maybe I'll make it like 30 sounds good. 30. And because I don't want to get it wrong, I did In this before the class. I'll pot it in there and then I'll explain as soon as I know that it works. Fingers crossed. All right. I think it'll work. I think it'll work. Save layout there. So I got my attributes defined.
Now, I kind of want to go back to my Workspace Manager and make sure that I fill in all the other stuff that I might not have done. So don't forget that descriptor again. Oh, we didn't have a number field. We're going to have a number field. So let me go back and create the number field. So I did a right-click, open a new window, because I kind of wanted to stay on that other window. It takes a little bit of time to hop between windows. So go back to aircraft change orders. And oh, no I define the descriptor.
HAGAY DVIR: Details.
TONY MANDATORI: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Item details. Yeah, thanks for keeping me on track. That's good. So, field name. I'm going to call it number. And it's going to be an auto number field. And we're going to call it ACO for aircraft change order. And it's going to be an auto-incremented number with a width of six.
So the computed field-- this is something that it's getting from [INAUDIBLE] SQL. So the database behind the scenes has these internal functions that I'm taking advantage of. So when we use auto-number, it'll automatically generate the number by running some internal functions in the computed field. So some internals there that you might not want to know. But we'll have more on computed fields. There's definitely more on the PowerPoint here on the things that you can use in computed fields. Incidentally, the days left is also using something in the computed fields which is getting from the database. So we'll take a look at that in just a little while. So, I want to save the layout there. I want to go back to my descriptor.
HAGAY DVIR: Can I say something?
TONY MANDATORI: Yeah, absolutely. Go right ahead.
HAGAY DVIR: Just one thing to point out. It's not exactly what Tony was talking about. But the auto-number-- please don't use it for revision controlled items. And the reason you don't want to use it for revision controlled items is because revision controlled items are sort of a sequence of items, and you want all of them to have the same number, the same part number or the same reference number. And if you use auto-numbers, each one of those will get its own number. That's just how the auto-numbers in the database works. So this is inappropriate. The auto-numbers are inappropriate for revision control items. Just wanted to point it out.
TONY MANDATORI: Ah, OK. So, yes, I know what it's telling me. So actually that's a good point. Now, I have gone to customers though, by the way, that said, my numbers actually, maybe they changed when I go from one version to another. Customers do things differently. So another flexibility that we have in the system is that none of those attributes that I've defined are fixed to the version number. I can actually change them from version to version.
So workspace relationships-- it's actually telling me something here that I forgot to do. I actually added a workspace relationship. But it was actually saying that I've done something that-- I haven't defined something that I need to define. So because I created a brand new revisioning workspace, I'll let you in on what I need to define.
So if I go to the Lifecycle Editor-- and I know this is something that people kind of don't like doing all the time. But the idea is that my change orders, they have all these transitions defined, by my aircraft change orders don't have any transitions defined. And so you've got to define what your transitions are. And I want to explain this map a little bit. And what it says is that, if I'm unreleased and I run a change order against my objects and my items and bombs are unreleased,
I can push them to production right away by saying bypass design and release, or I can say, go through the initial design release and make it go to end design. I have a choice here for my lifecycle transition. Do I want that choice to be available? Maybe not. Maybe all I want is just to bypass design and release if I'm doing an aircraft change order. And then it highlights the arrow. It says, yeah, that's a possible candidate for your managed items. Because it's an aircraft changer, it's a possible candidate for your managed items. So we'll try that out. So that one's good.
And then if I'm in production, I need to do something with this thing in production. Well, I want it to be able to do a production revision. So the arrow was a little bit messed up here. I guess if I move this a little bit it'll automatically adjust. So that's one thing I wanted to do when it's in production. So in this case what I've defined is that I can do an initial bypass design and release. And then I can do a production revision. And that's all I can do in my change orders. We'll keep it that simple for now.
And this thing doesn't have a save button. I think it saves as soon as I as soon as I do something to the UI. So just to make sure, I'll just go back to my main menu. Actually I'll go back to my Workspace Manager. I'll come back just to see how it looks. And actually I hit cancel over here. I have two tabs. Aircraft changer. And so that fixed the issue over here with the workspace relationships. And then if I look at my lifecycle editor again, just to make sure that I'm in the bounds here. Yeah. Click on aircraft change orders. There's only two transitions that I can actually do with aircraft change orders, which is different from the out of the box change orders.
So let's get back to this example. I think I've defined everything. I forgot the permissions again. What permissions do I need? So again, I'm going to look at view attachments. And we'll just select a few just really quickly-- view attachments, view managed items. Yeah. So actually let's go to the user interface security role.
And we're going to call this a new role, ACO read. Aircraft change orders, create role and add permissions. Do I need notifications? Yeah, maybe I want to view those notifications. I definitely want to view attachments if I have read access. No need for a bill of material. Probably no need for grid. I do need managed items. Those are the ones that I'm going to change. Maybe I'll need milestones. You know what, maybe I don't need project management for now. Relationships-- maybe I'll need it later on. We'll see. Don't need sourcing. Do I need any special permissions? Probably not I'm a viewer. I might want to see the owner and change information. Definitely need to view that workflow.
And do I need to view items? I can view items as well. View records owned by others-- so I want to see stuff that other people are working on. I like viewing the change log, just to see the changes that are in there. So I think that's a healthy set of permissions. And then what I want to do is I also want to say, OK, let's create one for read-write.
And again, I'm going to go to the aircraft change orders workspace. And now, if I'm a read and write kind of kind of guy, I'm going to want to be able to modify all this stuff here. And usually as you see here, I'm looking at the workspace and saying, do I need this functionality? And then just put it in there. So milestones, I said I had them. I kind of want to be able to update them. So I'm going to need them there.
I should be able to run imports if I'm an administrator. I definitely want to see that guy. Maybe I want to override workflow locks. We'll leave that open for now. Because I'm an administrator, I'll probably want to be able to force the submit as well. That's where my permission was. I called it submit for review. So I see the permission there. We're going to play with this in another example as well. But definitely--
HAGAY DVIR: Just to keep you on track, you have about 10 minutes.
TONY MANDATORI: Yeah, I know I'm running behind. But yeah, so-- I just don't want to rush through some of this stuff. There is all the detail in the handout if we if we want to continue. But yeah, so we have 15 minutes. We'll see what we can do here.
So we definitely want to create the item now. It should appear in my menu. So let me update this guy here. Now, I should be starting to see it in my menu now. No, I haven't added the users to the groups. I keep on missing these steps. So let's see the kind of groups I want. I create a little matrix over here-- the kind of groups that I want so.
And if I'm an engineer, I'd probably want to be able to write. If I'm everyone, I want to be able to view it. So these are the roles that we'll continue to define for later on. But we have a read and write. And engineers change admins, CIB admins. We definitely want those guys in the loop. So let's say, new group. We'll say engineers. Add the users to that group. Again, it'll just be me and Hagay. And then we'll add the role. So we are called engineers. I have the role that the engineers need. And engineers will need aircraft change orders, read-write. OK.
So I'll play with the other ones when I get to them. I kind of want to show this example so that we can move to the next demo. So now when I update the UI, what I should start to see is-- I should start to see this thing come up. And I've obviously missed something. Oh, engineers roles. I must of added it to the wrong one. ACO read-write. So, engineers-- if I'm part of engineers, I should be able to see this ACO read-write. Save and manage users just to check. And now they should come up. Love it when it's a live demo because you know when you've done something wrong. I still don't see it. OK. We'll get there, guys.
Did I have the view items? So now I've got a question my permissions. So let's go back to the role and just make sure that I have all the right permissions in that role. Administration Workspace Manager-- now what am I doing? Roles. ACO read-write. Let's go back to permissions and see what I've done wrong. Do I have view items? Because I was trying to go so fast, I said we'd add a view items from the everyone group. But I didn't add the everyone group, so I need to add 'em here.
So now it should come up. Third time's a charm. Is it really? Not really. There it is. And I actually went to exactly the place I wanted it to go. So aircraft example, aircraft change orders. It started putting the aircraft change orders in here. I want to create one because I'm really happy about that calculation. I want to show you guys how that works.
So, priority-- needed by day. We'll say it's needed by, not today but yesterday. OK, just to show that we're really behind the times here. We're behind, so it's red. Now if I say hey, hang on, I made a mistake. I actually need it by a couple of weeks from now-- you can do the calculation to change the display. That's kind of funky.
If I really want to show this, it'd be really useful to kind of see it in my view. So if I change my default view, update the view, I can quickly see now the things that are overdue. That's really powerful. Because now I can scan at a glance the ones that I need to look at. So I kind of wanted to show you that stuff now.
Now part of this example is also to show the filter picklists. So typically what happens is that you want to say that this change is applicable to a certain ATA chapter. So I want to show how to configure those filtered picklists. And we'll go back to our Workspace Manager. Inside of our Workspace Manager for the aircraft change order item details page, I want to add another field called ATA Section.
And the data type is going to be a picklist. Yeah, new picklist. I haven't defined it yet. So I'm going to say ATA chapters. I have two choices with picklists. I can make them a list of values that I define, or a list of values in another workspace. I am going to choose a list of values in the ATA workspace. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to play with this filter. And I'm going to say, because this is the section, this is going to be a filtered list on sections.
So when I choose a section, I'll then have a choice of chapter. And I'll say, save over here. Display with, I think we said 50 on this one, on section. Save that. And I'm going to create a new section in here. And I'm going to say, ATA. OK. So that's my ATA section. And now I'm going to add another field, which is another picklist-- ATA chapter. I'm going to choose that same workspace-- ATA chapters. And now I'm going to say filter that one. And this time it's not going to be that one. It's going to be the chapter. Display width-- I think we said 100. We'll just say at 100 just to make a match.
Now let's go to our workspace, and ATA. This UI wasn't updated. Let's go back here, update the UI by refreshing the page. Aircraft change order-- go to our favorite change order, our ACA 001 change order. I will edit that list. I can choose the section, general power plant, structures, systems. And then when I choose that section, it will limit the list of ATA chapters that are available to me to that section. So I chose general. It gave me the general ones. If I choose structures, I can then choose wings to be one of my selections over here. So that's the idea of the filtered picklist. So that's two demos that we've completed now-- demo two and three.
We are running short on time. There is another demo I do want to complete. So we're going to quickly go through and change management objects. And if we get to it, we get to it. If we don't, don't worry about it. You have all the steps inside the demo. There is some cool things with the workflow. The workflow, by the way, doesn't need to be scripted. And that's what I wanted to get to is that we went through some of the configuration here. This was all configuration. There was no script involved. There was a little bit with trying to calculate the way that the attribute should look there. But that's more of the computed field. We might not get to the exercise over here.
But what I wanted to do is I wanted to talk with the change management objects. And there's often a misconception of what change orders, change requests, and problem reports are inside PLM. The only one that gives you the authority to change your object is your change order. The change order has go to get approved in order for you to change your object. This might be obvious to you guys. But there's another object that says, should we do this change? That's not the change order. That's a change request. A change order is engineering [INAUDIBLE]. We've got to do the change. It's not controversial. It's something that we have to do. So sometimes you'll create the change order right away.
However-- and that's how we implement it. That's the how. So, I need to do this change. The engineer's going to come up with all the methods, everything that needs to be changed. They're going to put it on as managed items, and then they're going to run through the change. That's the how. The should-- if we should do this change or not-- that's the change request. And that's a basic workflow. It's a basic workspace with workflow. It does not have the capability of revising any of the objects. So we're not going to demo this over here. The other one is a problem report. So if you have an issue that you want to tackle, and you don't know what needs to be changed, or what the possible changes might be, you create a problem report.
So the problem report is going to say, I have an issue, don't know how to solve it. The change request is one alternative to that problem report that someone thinks you should do. And you have to assess whether you're going to do it the same way as the person has identified, or if you're going to solve the problem a different way. When you make a decision to actually go through and solve the problem, you create the change order. A change order is the only one that assigns effectivity as well. It's going to be cut in on a certain date. As soon as you release that change, those things are going to be effective. Those managed items are going to be effective.
This is another controversial point. And you can argue with me, and you might be right. The idea here is that, if you want to run efficiently in your business, most of your changes should be what, small or big? I know you're looking at the slide. I'm going to divert your attention. Small or big? Who says small? Most of your changes should be small. Who says big? OK, nobody says big so the smalls win. You're absolutely right. To run efficiently, most of your changes should be small.
You should not be actually trying to create a whole bunch of big changes or trying to put all your changes through CIB review or a CRB review. The idea is that change review board, change implementation board-- those boards usually have like 20 people in them or something, all engineers. You're paying them an hour to sit in the board and talk about changes. You don't want to focus in on the ones that are easy to do. You want to focus in on the ones that are hard. The other ones, let them review it at their leisure. If they need help they can they can go through it.
Again, some good practices-- I'm going to skip through this slide a little bit quick because I want to get to what the demo was supposed to be. We won't have time to do it, but I do want to get to what the demo was supposed to look like, just to give you the idea that you can actually do this with configuration only. You do need affected items. Affected items are the things that are going to be changed.
Another good point here that I can't miss-- continual improvement. I know we've only got five minutes. I'll let you go, believe me. But continued improvement-- don't try and do everything all at once. Don't try to make your change as complex as you can right at the beginning. Start off small. Get the users to tell you why it's got to be more complex. Why doesn't the simple process work is what you've got to say to them. And they might have good reasons. You listen to them, you gather the requirements. But you start with something pretty basic.
It's a state machine. We'll talk about what the state machines later on. OK, demo four-- what the idea was here is that I want to configure the workflow. I'll show you what the solution is and then we'll basically break and you'll have access to all these slides. There's a lot more material later on. I didn't expect to get through all of them. I did want to get through this one though.
This is how you could configure your workflow without any scripting whatsoever. And the idea here is, I create. So we already put create and complete in there. And the idea was that there's some guy who creates it who's going to decide, is this something that needs to go to CIB review? Or is it something that just needs another person to review it? That's what that decision is for.
I can have different permissions. I can give different groups of people, like the CIB admins, the ability to promote that one. Nobody else can, just the CIB admins. Turn that arrow on just for them. And then I can say, well people, like all reviewers, special engineers-- they can go and do the simple review. So I can block them out from actually participating in the workflow just by configuring permissions-- no scripting whatsoever.
And then the last example was going to be-- that was one demo. The last demo was going to be-- well if I do want to have something a little bit more complex, because each of those permissions would appear then inside my selection for permissions, then I can say, well, I can have different groups or different roles defined.
So the different roles having the different permission-- assign them to different groups, just to keep it CIB admins and change admins. And I can actually pinpoint who the people are. I can further pinpoint it now with scripting. You remember how I said ATA chapter, wings and power plants and stuff like that? If I only want the wing engineers or the wing CIB admins approving the wing stuff, I have to write a little bit of script, but it's not hard.
And we talk about scripting a lot. But I can do something like this, where I can say, OK, when you're looking if you can promote, if you should highlight or show those arrows for promotion, run a little bit of script to say, are they a member of the chapter group 57 wings? Are they a member of 57 wings? And if so then let them approve. If they're not a member of 57 wings, they should never be able to see those transitions. So I can create a script here as a condition, a condition script. And I put it inside the workflow that says, run this little bit of code to see whether you should turn it on or off. OK.
That's it. Sorry we ran out of time. I would have loved to show this to you. If you like, try this out on your own. I have all the details in the handout. And then send me an email if you can't get it working. I'd love to help you. Any questions? Quick? No? OK, you're dismissed.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
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