Cloud Control: A Hands-On Experience with Upchain Cloud PDM

TONY NGUYEN: Hey, welcome. Thank you for viewing this class. Welcome to Cloud Control, a hands on experience with upchain cloud PDM. My name is Tony Wynn. I'm a solutions engineer here at Autodesk if you'd like to take a snap of this and connect with me on LinkedIn. Today, I'm going to be going through how you can set up your own interactive demonstration of upchain, our cloud PDM.

Before we do that, let's go ahead and take a look at our safe harbor slide. Be sure to pause this and read it all, of course. We make these statements before each one of these classes. Be sure that you go ahead and read this carefully.

All right. Again, thanks for spending some time with us. Quick agenda for today. We're going to be looking at how to set up your environment, including how to request an environment, and then going through and actually accessing that, how to get into your tenants, how to get it up and running so that you can download the connectors, install that into your favorite CAD program, and then, of course, do a lot of the PDM type capabilities you would anticipate. We also have a bonus benefit of the web interface. We're going to show you how to do some bill of materials management there as well as some change management. And then finally, we're going to finish with our productivity plugin because this is more than just CAD. It's also for a few of those Microsoft utilities that I know each one of you likes to use.

So let's go ahead and get started with our setup. We'll move over to our Autodesk profile here. From autodesk.com, you're going to be able to access this by clicking here. And you can go ahead and login. I'm already signed in. To be able to access your upchain tenant, if you already have upchain assigned to your Autodesk user management profile, you can go here to your products and services. And from this screen, you can go into all products and services if you'd like to. And you likely have quite a few listed. You can just go ahead and go to the search and find your upchain professional.

From here, you can hit access. There will be some information if you haven't set up your tenant already that you'll need to fill in to get that request. And we'll usually have that fulfilled for you in 48 to 72 hours. You will receive an invite into your tenant. Now, if you don't already have access to upchain professional through your Fusion 360 Manage With Upchain subscription, you can always go back into your Autodesk profile. Find us here going into our support, which will be here. Once you get to support, use your Autodesk Assistant to go ahead and ask for Education and Trial Support. From there, you'll be contacted by your account representative. That person will be able to navigate you to the right people to get you an interactive demo request.

From there, we're going to go ahead and follow the rest of these steps, once you have access to your tenant. Once you do have access to your tenant and you sign in via your Autodesk credentials, you'll be greeted here with your Upchain interface. You'll also be greeted with this Welcome to Upchain Tutorial.

This is going to be context-driven. It's going to be on each one of the new work spaces that you go through in Upchain web interface, including your dashboard, bill of materials management, so on and so forth. If you'd like to, you can always exit out of here. We can always launch it at another time by using the dashboard guide.

To get started with Upchain in this interactive demonstration, you're going to want to go ahead and give yourself, of course, all the users who are going to be part of your interactive demonstration access to your tenant. To do that, you're going to be able to come here and go directly into Administration, which is going to open up your Tenant Administration panel.

From here, you are going to see that we have our users category. We'll go ahead and jump into here. There's quite a bit of other capability as far as your admin panel goes, but for today, we're going to keep it simple with users. From your User panel, you can invite users, adding their email, choosing a role. And then, simply choose your default division.

You can add as many users as you'd like all within this one interface. And then, click Invite. Those users will now get access, via an invite in their email. You can bring them directly into your tenant.

From here, we're going to need to go ahead and create a project for you to be able to add your data into. To do that, we're going to use this simple Create Project button here. You're going to be greeted with four different templates, all of them are very simple.

There is actually no difference between the top three. Using this template is something that's more of an advanced capability you'll want to do later on. For today, let's just go ahead and choose an engineering project.

From here, we'll need to add a couple of fields. And then, we can go ahead and hit Create. This is going to create a new project within your Autodesk Upchain environment.

Importantly, you will need to go to Project Settings. I recommend going ahead and creating this as a favorite project. And then, we'll need to do two steps-- start workflow-- and since we're not going to be adding any Gantt charts or project management or setting up any business processes for today, we can go ahead and add our members.

We could select from project roles and then, the users that are available for it and hit OK. You can add as many of those members as you like. Once you're complete, you can go ahead and hit Activate. Once you've activated your project, you can always add additional users after this as well.

Once the project is active, you will see that here, it is ready to have information added to it. The next step in setting up your interactive demo is going to be downloading the necessary plugins. To do that, we'll navigate to it from our Home screen.

Come back up to your profile list here and select Plugins. From the Plugins menu, you're going to want to download two connectors. One is the CAD connector here.

You're going to see that the CAD connector is capable of integrating directly into all of these CAD applications here. If you have specific versions or questions about that, I would recommend going to the Help page to be able to see exactly which ones Upchain supports at this moment. From here, you can hit Download.

Once that is downloaded, you'll go ahead and launch the executable, which we'll see here in just a second. I also recommend going ahead and downloading Upchain for Office, or the Productivity Plugin as we'll call it today. This is going to allow you to integrate directly into Word, Excel and PowerPoint, which we'll see at the end of this demonstration.

Once you have downloaded and run your connector, you will be greeted with a Setup Wizard which will have you run through all of your downloads. This may include both the connector as well as an Amazon utility called Corretto, which allows you to interface with your Vault on AWS. Go ahead and download both of those and then, launch them.

When you do launch them, you're going to be greeted with the Upchain launcher. You're going to see, that if you have multiple CAD softwares that are supported, you will go ahead and see all of those here. Today, we're going to be using Inventor 2023.

If you're using Inventor, go ahead and launch from there. If you're using SolidWorks or any of the other programs, go ahead and hit Launch right from this utility. You will see that once you hit the Launcher and choose your card from this utility, it will actually install the plugin for you. Again, we'll see that here in just a second.

From there, you're going to want to go ahead and open the window for whatever CAD you chose to use. You will see, in your plugin utilities here in Inventor, in our collaborate tab, you'll have Upchain available to you. Assuming that you're still signed into the web interface, it's going to go ahead and it will bring up your projects and your workspace for you.

Now that we've gone ahead and created a new project, we'll find that workspace right here. We're going to go ahead and activate that project that we just created. And now, we're going to show you a few of the capabilities within the CAD connector.

Today, in the connector, we're going to look at how to register components or itemization of your CAD BOM. We'll do some basic and typical PDM functionality, such as check-in and check-out. And then, we'll look at a few of the additional features as well.

Let's move back over in Inventor. I'm going to go ahead and open up a data set. You'll see here that we have assemblies, sub-assemblies and parts, as well as some skeleton components, those types of things that you'll use in everyday design.

From our Upchain connector we can go ahead and select the Bill of Materials View From the EBOM, we'll hit this refresh. What this is going to do is it's going to look at your CAD hierarchy, as well as what's already registered to Upchain on the Cloud. From here, you're going to see that all of these components are not registered.

Let's go ahead and do that. You can use any data set you like, or whichever supported CAD that you're using. If you would like to grab a sample data set, I recommend something like GrabCAD or any of those public CAD applications.

Of course, if you're using test information of your own, you would be able to use that here as well. Whatever you'd like to end up bringing into the system today during this exercise, feel free to. We're going to go ahead and right-click this. We want to Create Item.

You're going to see that we have other options here, but creating item is going to do the automatic itemization and bill of materials creation for you. When we hit Create Item at the top-- we'll select the project that we want to add it to, which is the project we created specifically for today-- I hit Select.

It's going to do a bit of thinking. It's going to create our bill of materials structure. And then, we're going to get some additional options on what we want to do with this.

It's also going to start to sync files up to the Cloud as needed. Before we finish that operation, it's going to give us some options. You're going to see here, on the left, all of the CAD bill of materials that we have, or what we would consider our CAD structure. If we go ahead and open up a few of these, we'll see that we have our CAD structure here.

Anything in red is going to be a new component. If I had any other components that were already registered to our Cloud Vault in Upchain, they would be black. We would not have a need to upload those. You're also going to see here, on the right, we're going to be adding these to an engineering BOM structure, which is all going to be new.

We have some options to go ahead and choose what item type we want. Just for reference, item types are going to drive your automatic part numbering schemes that you can set up in your Upchain Admin Console. For now, we see that we have 34 new models.

Regardless of the quantity of those models in the structure, we see here, we have 34 new models that will all get items and item numbers associated with them. We can go ahead and hit OK. It will create that bill of material structure. It will grab all of the files and transmit them to the Cloud.

We'll go ahead and rebuild that structure for us with the new itemized bill of materials. It's also going to, at this time, create translations of all of these components, starting with Inventor parts and assemblies and creating .STLs, steps, as well as PDFs if we had drawings associated with this. It will also grab a nice PNG file for those thumbnails that we like.

It's going to take all of these, load them to Cloud, associate them with their masters. And then, we'll have this ready to be in a collaborative design environment. We see here that our CAD BOM has now been populated with all of our item masters that have been created from that register component capability.

If we take at the upper level assembly, we'll see that we can also see our items here. You're going to notice that it's auto-generated an item number for us and given us all the metadata on our creation. It has that PNG file here.

You also see that it has created a new file name for it. We have designated this file naming scheme in our Upchain Admin Tenant Properties. You can also have different file naming if you choose. We currently have this set in this demonstration to adopt the file number. It will change the file name if you choose. Today, it's just inheriting the item number.

You're also going to see that it has options for the remainder of the details here, what we consider attributes or metadata, if you will. You're going to be able to configure all of the metadata that you like, as well as have that metadata or attributes mapped directly to the model properties or the other way around. You can have model properties mapped directly to your Upchain attributes.

One other part of this that we'll see here, just on the initial creation, is that you get some visual indicators. We see that this has turned green and it has a green lock next to it. We can go ahead and hover over that and see why it has a lock.

You can see that it has a check-out lock to me. That's because I created it. When you create new items in the system, via the Register Item capability, they are going to remain checked out to you.

To show a little bit of how the visual indicators work, I'm going to go ahead and cancel all check-outs-- which is going to take this entire assembly and cancel the check-outs-- meaning if we had any saved information or made any changes to this model between the time we registered it and the time we do this cancel check-out, it will not save those to the Cloud. I'll go ahead and hit this Cancel Check-Out.

It's just going to ask me, are you sure you want to do that? I'm going to go ahead and confirm and hit yes. You'll see now that the visual indicators of the green and the locks are gone. And now, we have in bold black, it still gives us visual indicators, such as what state it's in, if it has a drawing associated with it, what item type it is. But right now, we don't see any colors which means it is checked in.

For check-in and check-out, we're going to go ahead and check-out this upper level assembly. We could, if we wanted to, Select All or Select By State. But for now, we'll select a couple of these just to show what this would look like within the system.

I can go ahead and check these out. Of course, if they are on a check-out lock-- either by from me or any of the folks that I'm collaborating with on this project-- I wouldn't be able to check them out. You see that green check mark again? We've gone ahead and checked out these components. They're ready to be worked on.

If any of my colleagues were to have checked these out, this little lock symbol would actually be red. When I hovered over it, of course, it would tell me that it had a check-out and it was assigned to somebody else. But for now, we're the only ones working in this assembly, so all of the check locks will be to us.

If you're working in a collaborative, interactive demonstration, I recommend that you have multiple people from your team go ahead and check these out. Of course, if you're working on a demo set, you only want one person to register that demo set, because everybody else won't be able to since the data will already exist in the system.

Go ahead. Have somebody load the data set for you. And then, everyone will be able to access it, as long as you've given them permissions to see it from your project.

Now, we have this available to us to now go ahead and modify. If we select on this basic component here, we can open it directly from our CAD BOM. We'll refresh this to get the right information.

This component can be worked on. We'll do a slight modification here. We can also, when this is checked out, begin to modify our attributes. You see, as we come in here, we can go ahead and choose to add material or any of what we call common attributes.

You can think of common attributes as out-of-the-box attributes that will come already assigned to each item. You can also have any number of custom attributes you decide you want to add to this particular item. For the sake of today's, we'll go ahead and we'll add some additional information, such as drawing description, so that you can see that we can start to be notified of recent changes.

If we wanted to, we could map this to the file properties and then, of course, inherit that to either the drawing or all the way downstream to another enterprise application, such as ERP. Now that this has been changed, we can also come in here and make a slight modification to the extrusion. We're just going to move this slightly and hit OK.

We actually have a change to this model. To communicate that up into the Cloud server, all we have to do is right-click this and hit Save. What this is going to do?

It's going to say that this is a new version of this component. If we wanted to, we can check that by looking here, that we are currently on the file version 2. Of course, we can go always go back to the previous versions.

It's going to create a new version. It's also going to create new translations. Where we can see that is right here in our documents. We would expect that we have our CAD BOM, which is just the component IPT file.

We don't have any drawings associated with this, but this is where we would see that. And then translations, we see that we have the STEP file, the .STL and the .PNG, all on version 2. All available to us and of course, that is entirely automated, which is great.

You're also going to see a couple other attributes here to be able to get information from your item. We can do a preview of it. We can do categorization, which is a bit of an advanced feature not for today.

But if you'd like, you can always look that up in the Help menu. You can do a Where Used, which for this component will bring you up the tree, the entire assembly, finished ending at the project. You can also see different manufacturers, if it's on any assignments, projects, so on and so forth.

You'll also be able to see if it has any assignments associated to this particular item and part. We'll see that a little bit more here in just a second, in the additional features portion of this. Now, this has been saved. We made a modification. We've increased the version here.

Of course, we can always go back to version 1 if we wanted to. This item is ready. We've done what we needed to do with it. We can always go back to the assembly.

Here, just to double check, OK on that one. Just to double check that component changes have been made, we'll look here. We will see that this is already on version 2 for us. Those updates have been notified.

We've seen check-in, check-out. We can also do things such as an advanced search. If we look here, we can do a basic search. Let's take a look at what advanced might look like.

From here, we're going to be able to search all of our items. You can also search by file, project, customer and EBOM. For here, let's go ahead and select File. We'll go ahead and grab any Inventor type, just to make this simple.

You can see that we can add additional filters as well. And then, we can hit Search. If you do searches often, such as fasteners or any type of library components, you can go ahead and save your searches and they'll be available to you here.

If we were to take something like this, you're going to notice that we have a few options here. One is that we can look at all of the item information, including attributes, look at the files associated with it and then, of course, do all of the other item information lookups that we had before.

We can download it and open it directly in the CAD application. We can also Insert them. Had we chosen to before we launched this advanced search, we can also replace components.

Go ahead and exit out of this for now. That search functionality is a great way to be able to reuse your components, reuse your designs, and then, of course, get to them very easily. That is our search capability.

We're going to go ahead. We've saved this already, so we're going to cancel that check-out. We don't need to do another save.

For this upper level assembly, making sure that we got the right version here, we're going to go ahead and do a check-in. Real quickly, the difference between a check-in, a cancel check-out, and a save-- the save is going to save your work that you've done. It's going to transmit that to the Cloud and create a new version on the Cloud. It will leave it checked out to you or whoever is making that save.

A check-in will do all of that but then, relinquish control of that and allow anybody else who has the permissions to also be able to check it out. That will, of course, relinquish the check-out lock. Like we mentioned before, if you do cancel check-out, either all check-out or at an individual level, it will not save whatever changes you have done.

A good point to clarify, though, is that it will also not cancel out of the assembly or part you're working on. Those changes that you've made will still be available to you on your local working model, what's open in your application at this time. They just won't be saved to the Cloud. You will also relinquish the control of that particular component.

For now, we're going to go ahead and hit check-in. It's going to do a Save. It's going to create a new version. It's going to create new versions of all of the translations. And then, it will have it checked in and relinquish that lock.

At the upper level assembly, it's going to look at all the EBOM, make sure that it has all the correct information. And then, of course, if we have any anomalies, it will let us know that via the BOM [INAUDIBLE]. What we have here, the entire assembly has been checked in. It's been saved. You'll notice, at this upper level assembly, we now have version 2.

We've done a register component, which automatically itemized all of the bill of materials via the BOM structure and the CAD structure. We've auto-assigned item numbers, part numbers, if you will. And then, we've registered that bill of materials structure to the Cloud, as well as all the files and their translations.

We've done a full check-out, modified a component, saved it, checked it back in. And now, we've gone ahead and checked in the upper level assembly. Those are really the fundamental Product Data Management, or PDM, capabilities that we want to be able to do here in this tool.

Adding some additional features here that you may be interested in, we may also want to go to more of a project management role and start adding assignments. To do that, we're going to move between the CAD BOM, which we've seen, the EBOM that we saw in the BOM wizard, where we created the engineering BOM, and the project BOM.

The biggest difference between the project BOM and the CAD BOM is that from here, we can actually see all CAD items as well as non-CAD items, or other CAD items if you will. If within this product structure we had things like an upper level assembly that didn't have CAD associated with it, or if it had components within the assembly that had other CAD, such as SolidWorks in this case, or did not actually have CAD associated with it-- maybe it just has documents or nothing at all-- we would be able to see all of those items here as well.

The CAD BOM is going to be a one-to-one link with what's currently loaded in your application. The project BOM is going to allow us to see all of the bill of materials. From the project BOM, we're also going to get some additional capabilities, including creating tasks and investigation requests.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the term investigation request, that's all right. I wasn't familiar with it either before I started using Upchain. Just be aware that it's a way to create processes within the system.

Really, you can have any type of process live under an investigation request. Again, a bit more of an advanced feature of the tool, so we'll leave that there for now. Just be aware that it's a business process that can really take the shape of anything you do today.

For this demonstration, we're going to go ahead and create a task at this upper level assembly. We could create a task at any level we'd like. But for now, we're going to go ahead and do it at the top level.

For here, we'll put a design review. Of course, you're going to want to name it something specific and give it a description. You're going to have different types if you choose.

Today, we're just defaulting to a simple task. You can also have different types of workflows. If you have different approvers or different milestones you need to hit, you can go ahead and choose that. But for today, we're going to go ahead and choose Design Review.

We can choose if we want to kick off the workflow right when we create it or not. We'll add a description. You can choose your workflow. You can also choose to start the workflow right when we create it and choose a priority for it. This will allow it to be added to the different KPI dashboards within the tool.

Of course, you're going to want to choose an assignee, and what date you want it to start, and how long you need that task to last. We can also add documents to it. If we hadn't created this task directly from a level within the project BOM, we can then go ahead and choose which file we want it to be associated to. For now, it's going to automatically add the one that we chose when we kicked this off.

Let's go ahead and create this task. It's going to let us know that task has been created. If we go into Assignments, we can now see that design review is available to us.

You're also going to see that we can kick off workflows here. We can also complete workflows here, approve those. Really, you can start to add some project management, task management right here within the CAD connector and then, complete them all. We do that by design so you can stay within the tool that you know best, which is likely going to be your CAD environment.

Let's say you were given a task to complete something. You would be able to only see the actual stages in which you need to take action on that. Once you've hit that stage and you either approved it, completed it, or whatever that task may be, it may go to somebody else. You can always see where it is, but you may not need to take action on it. They're all going to be available here too.

Let's go ahead and go back to the CAD BOM. Let's just go ahead and assume that this bill of materials, the entire structure, is ready for initial release. Let's look at how we would go about doing that here in our CAD connector.

We use the concept of carts here in Upchain. We can go ahead and add this to a cart. When we add the upper level assembly, it will take all of the entire bill of materials. We don't really need to worry about selecting which ones we need. It will add it all for us.

If we go to that cart, we'll see here that it's available to us. If we had multiple parts or assemblies from the same project that we were working on and we added them to cart, they would all show here. We could select and deselect the ones that we want to go ahead and add to different workflows.

For now, we only have the one selected. When we right-click it, we can now send it to a workflow. We have a few different workflows here just for demonstration purposes.

When you get your initial tenant setup, you'll likely just have the ECR workflow, which is our out-of-the-box change request that we're actually going to use today. I'm going to go ahead and select that. It's going to go into the Cloud and create that for us.

If we go back into our assignments, we allow that to reload and we look at that, we see that we actually have a change request available to us now. That's going to kick us off to go look over in the web interface. We'll interface with this a bit more.

But just be aware, in the CAD connector, you can complete the majority of that CR right here. And then, of course, if you are on the end of this change request in which it needs actual action, approvals, any of those things, you can do that here as well. Let's move back over into our agenda here.

We'll go take a look at our web interface. We'll move back into our Chrome tab and take a look at what this project, as well as this bill of materials, is going to look like in that web interface. We'll move back into our web interface where we created the project and added our users before. We see that we have our project here.

We select on this project. It's going to do a information flyout for us, where we can look at what is going on within our project. You're also going to see that we have additional KPIs. As we add tasks, as we add project management aspects to this, our KPIs will begin to fill up.

But for now, we're going to go and take a look at that bill of materials. From here, we're going to see that we have our BOM workspace here. We'll see that we have our entire bill of materials that we had in our CAD connector available to us here.

If we select on this upper level assembly, we'll see that we have our thrust vector nozzle assembly that we were using before, as well as all that information that we had available to us in our CAD connector, including the other work spaces that we had available to us before, such as Where Used. Additionally, we can go ahead and open up, directly from the bill of materials, our viewer.

What this does is, it really democratizes the CAD data. You can see that from our web interface, we can go ahead and see the full Inventor assembly directly here, as well as the entire CAD structure of it. And then, we're going to have a lot more utilities available to us, including markups.

Today, we won't go over markups. But if you're doing this interactive demo while playing along, or playing along while viewing this interactive demo, please go ahead and use the markup tool as it is a very powerful tool here in Upchain. Close out of that. Now that we have this bill of materials open to us here, even though we created this in Inventor, we can start to investigate an entire indentured bill of materials.

Since it is our engineering bill of materials as well as our project bill of materials from what we looked at in our CAD connector, we can actually start to add non-CAD components to this bill of materials, or items from our libraries, maybe even documents if we needed to. We can do quite a bit of capabilities here within our web interface, including investigate the entire bill of materials, see the 3D models, and then, of course, interrogate them.

You do see that this has a status, that it is locked even though it's in development. If we hover over that, we do see that it's currently on the change request. That's that change request that we went ahead and kicked off.

From here, if we wanted to see any business processes this has on it, we can go directly into the business process. We know that there's a change request currently on this. We can go right into here.

From our Change Request screen, we're going to see that it brings in the entire bill of materials. It will let you know if it's locked or not. If you already have released components within your bill of materials, they will show as released. They won't need to be locked, as they have already been released in the system.

They will lock any of the components that are being released by this change order, though. We can also add additional components to this change order, so that we can effect change on any number of them, even if we didn't add them originally. If we had done a previous release on this, we could actually do a Compare Revisions between those different releases.

From here, you can still edit this change request, including changing the workflow type, the criticality, and then, if you like, add a description. Any time, this change request is available to you in your Business Processes tab here within your project. We went from bill of materials to business processes.

You can always go ahead and look at that here, as well as if you have any actions that you're going to need to take, such as starting the workflow, approvals, tasks that may be in that workflow, and of course, rejecting them or sending them back to the previous state. We're also going to be able to see any items associated with that here, documents that you may have added to this, or if you need to add documents to it and then, if you have any activities like tasks.

We can always go back to that previous view by just jumping directly into the change request by double-clicking it. We can start the workflow and move through that. For the sake of time today, we won't walk through the entire change request. But if you are following along or watching this, I do recommend going ahead and putting it through its paces, as well as have different people be approvers on that change workflow.

If you have any questions on how to do that, I recommend going into our Help Center. With the access to your tenant, you do have access to the entire Upchain Academy, which is here, which will walk you through step-by-step instructions on how to go about that.

We've looked at, so far, how to set up our environment, invite people in and create projects. We've also looked at Upchain in the CAD connector directly in your CAD application, in this case, Inventor. We've created data by bringing in a model and registering it, thus creating a full itemized bill of materials for it. Then, we did a check-in, check-out, modification, as well as adding a task to one of the components within that CAD connector.

We also showed how we could add that upper level assembly or any of the in-development components to a change request. Then, we moved over here into the web interface, looked at how we might use the bill of materials-- one, to investigate your EBOM as well as launch the viewer-- and then, how we can go into the business processes, such as change request.

That's quite a bit in a very little bit of time. We're also going to add on to look at what Upchain looks like in Excel as well as Word. To do that, let's just take a quick look at here, what we call the productivity plugin.

You already saw the plugin page from Upchain web interface when we downloaded the CAD connector. If you downloaded the productivity plugin as well, you'll already have it there for you. What we can do now is launch Excel and take a look at what that looks like over in that application.

Let's launch Excel. We've gone ahead and opened up a basic Excel template here. You're going to notice that we have Upchain here on the right-hand side as well as in our menu here. You're going to see that we have a couple of options, including Import Project. What this is going to do is take the document that we're currently working on and add it to the project documents.

We can also, in Excel, start to look at different aspects of the project, such as the bill of materials. To do that, we're going to go ahead and grab our projects. Let's go ahead and refresh this.

There we go, get our AU 2023 project. We can go into the bill of materials. We can look at different product structure.

Also, from here, we can go ahead and insert the engineering BOM into the document. Doing so will launch a dialogue, in which we can decide on which fields from the bill of materials we want to add. We can create templates, if you are bringing your bill of materials out of Upchain and into Excel, to manage, modify or any of those things.

Or if you are going to transmit that bill of materials either to a contract manufacturer, or you have more of a manual load to other applications, such as MRP or ERP, you can do that as well. For today, we'll go ahead and grab a few of these. You're going to see that we have a lot of different out-of-the-box capabilities that we may want to add.

We're going to grab these ones for now, ones we know are going to be populated. Again, the attributes you see here are going to be added to. You can add to them as much as you like and add whatever attributes you might need. If you don't see one here, you can always add that to an item.

Once we hit OK, it's going to go ahead and generate that bill of materials for us. And now, we have a table of the entire bill of materials that we needed. You're also going to notice that these have links.

If we wanted to, when we hit this link, it's going to bring us directly to that viewer that we saw before. We can go ahead and modify this as needed. When we're ready, we can also use this tool to import those updates by importing the BOM attributes.

If we wanted to, we could actually start entirely from scratch and create an entire product structure, and import that entire structure into a bill of materials. That is what we consider top-down type of bill of materials creation, instead of using a tool like Inventor like we did today. We can actually bring them in via Excel, using this productivity plugin. You're also going to see that we have our templates here. This is where we can manage our templates.

To do actual document management and not just bill of materials management or exporting here, we can use the Upchain tab, which we see Import to Project. To do that, let's go ahead and take a look at what this looks like over in Microsoft Word. You'll see that I've just gone ahead and opened a basic Microsoft Word template here.

I'm going to go ahead and hit this toggle pane. If I'm signed in my Upchain project, it will already be here available to me. We can go ahead and select that project.

Each project has a Document Management Workspace available in it. When we import to a project, that's where it's going to go into. We've chosen our project. We can look at our documents.

You'll see that currently, we don't have any documents within the system. We can go ahead and hit Import to Project. I'm going to save this first. We're going to save it locally first.

Once that's been done, we're going to go ahead and again, hit that Import to Project. What this is going to do is it's going to bring us directly into our documents. You're going to notice that right now, we only have two locations to import this to.

You can modify the structure if you'd like using our Admin panel. You will have your documents category. You can always add as many file folders as you'd like. But you're also going to have this Link Documents. Link Documents are going to allow you to link documents across different projects as well as to items.

For now, we'll just take a look at this. Very similar to the CAD connector, you are going to see that we have the different versions available to us. We're going to have the option to check this out and download it. You can see those same capabilities up here in the Revit.

We're going to be able to mark this up and do quite a bit of the capability that we had in the CAD connector, somewhat analogous to being able to check-in, check-out, modify. We can also go ahead and walk this through workflows. You're going to see that we have a workflow here.

Out-of-the-box, we can do Publish Workflows. You can also do more bespoke document approval workflows. Once you have that here, we can kick those off, just as we did change requests and tasks in the CAD connector.