Fast and Furious—60 Fusion Lifecycle Quick Tips You Must Know

ASHLEY HOOPER: Hello ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for coming to my class. I'm glad you want to learn 60 tips in 60 minutes. This is going to be very quick. Right. So should we start with some instructions? Wrong way. Sorry. Right. So you're going to be presented by myself, Ashley Hooper, the Justin Bieber one. Brian-- Yeah. And our little Shetland pony.

SAOIRSE COLGAN: So we're trying to show some level of vulnerability here to make everyone feel comfortable, so we decided to pull out our worst haircuts. I went through a phase of wanting to look like a Shetland pony. Brian had his mullet period. And yeah, Ashley's clearly the pretty boy out of us with, yeah, Justin Bieber.

ASHLEY HOOPER: So I don't work for Autodesk. I work for Spirax Sarco, so I'm a customer. So I'm just here behalf of Autodesk to obviously share a little bit of experience and exposure with my tips. Saoirse, do you want to--

SAOIRSE COLGAN: Yes. So my name's Saoirse Colgan and I'm a-- well, previous role was a technical consultant with Fusion Lifecycle. I've been working with the product for about six years now. I used to work with it when it was formally known as PLM360. And I'm now working on our partner enablement program. So working with the partners that deliver a solution

BRIAN SCHANEN: Yeah, that's me up there with the-- it wasn't called a mullet then. Right. So I didn't know that that was-- Brian Schanen. I've been with Autodesk 16 years, something like that. I'm product manager right now for Fusion Lifecycle, formally known as, PLM360. Formerly, I was a product manager for Vault. In fact, my entire tenure here as all been Vault, and data management, PLM, and process. So I'm a process and workflow and data. geek. So if you're like that, you're going to like Lifecycle.

ASHLEY HOOPER: OK. So we're going to start off by looking at tabs. So how many of you are actually familiar with PLM now? OK. All of you. How many of you are looking to go towards it? OK. So does any of you actually use all the tabs? Or do you know what every single tab does? OK. So this is going to be very helpful for you. All right.

So we'll start with the first one, the basic one, the Item Details. This is standard across the whole workspace you create. This is going to be your first. And a site you can never hide. This is saying that the user's going to be entrapped the most. OK? Now, in this, you're already able to create sections. So you can prettify your layout and you can specify fields. So as you can see, in the image, this is what the end user's going to see. OK. And this is all just a general about parents and control end of data.

The next one is Grid. Now this is possibly the next-- well, I would say, this is like a spreadsheet. I wouldn't use it like an Excel spreadsheet. It's definitely not as powerful as one, but it lays it out. So you have your columns, you have your rows. So you can utilize it for many things. So you can specify as many columns as you want. Preferably, I'd maintain-- it would probably be about five, six columns, just for presentation notes. But then, in terms of rows, well, what would you say, about 50 maximum maybe? But it is quite nice if you want to just maybe design-- sorry-- to sign up authority groups. So you can put names in there, and that way you can monitor timestamps and that sort of stuff. It's quite nice. It's very pretty.

Now the Attachments. Now this does what is says on the tenant. You attached documents, and pictures, videos. But it's very independent to that record. OK. So this item is always going to be there, associated to this is one record, and therefore, you can access it at any time. Oh, and you can also zip stuff up.

Now, the Change Log. Auditors love this. So basically, now you can monitor every single change that happens on this record. For example, your summary, you create an item, and that sort of stuff, and, I put it down as Ashley Hooper. A week later, Brian Schanen changes it. In the log, it will be captured to say Brian Schanen has replaced the value. It will tell you when. So from an auditing portability, it's brilliant.

SAOIRSE COLGAN: OK so for those of you that use the product, you'll know that we have a milestones tab. And the milestones allow you to add time-- we have that feature to allow you to add time-related milestones to workflow. Each milestone is hard coded to a workflow state. So again, the purpose of Milestones is to kind of prompt the user to close out on a task in a timely fashion. We can automate the milestone tab, as well. So we can run behavior scripts, create, edit, and to o-generate predefined milestones.

What I do say to customers is, turn on the milestone tabs, when you're ready, when you've had some learnings from the process and using the workflow. Because again, each milestone is locked to a workflow state. So I see this as the phase 2, when you're working with the product. But again, they're quite powerful because, as I said, you can auto-set predefined milestones. And the intent is to ensure that the user closes out on these tasks in a timely fashion. Each milestone will appear in their outstanding work on their dashboard. It's just a prompt.

Milestones, an extension of their state, they can roll up into a Project Management tab. So who here is using the project management tab? No? OK. So Project Management tab, it's a nice feature. We can roll up and task across multiple workspaces. So again, this is nice with new product introduction. You get this nice Gantt chart visual. Yeah, it's quite powerful.

OK. Affected Items. So with Managed Items tab. So drive the Revisioning of a lifecycle/revision controlled workspace. So the Managed Item tab controls diversioning of a related item, which has a lifecycle. So it's a relationship. It's linked, and, fun fact is that you can add fields to the managed item tab, which not everybody utilizes.

You can also automate, we can automatically set the lifecycle on the managed item tab. So you can script to it. Not everybody does that, but I know Ash, at Spirax, you guys are automating that, but something that you'll see later is something coming in a new UI, is that we-- yeah, let that be revealed afterwards. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. OK. So next.

ASHLEY HOOPER: OK. The Relationship tab. Now, this comes with two bits of features here. You can create two different types of relationships. So you can create a bidirectional or unidirectional. So the bidirectional will allow a relationship in both items, whereas a uni is only one way. So use them how you will. A bidirectional is very good. Obviously, you can maintain a very hard relationship between each other. That is very powerful, especially when you want to maintain a relationship between items.

Tab Orders and Names. Now, as I said, the item details, you can't hide it. But it also needs to be the first in the last. It can't go second, it can't go third. But you can rename all of the tabs to anything you want. So you can make it to your business standards. So obviously, item details doesn't mean anything to an end user. So you can call it, main details, or main, on the grid, as you said. As you can see that, you can go to the line items. So what are the items you want to associate with? So you can actually put your own business standards for naming. So all your workspaces can be very unique.

But on that note, do not use all the tabs. You don't need to. You should think ahead, beforehand, and just decide which times you're actually going to need. Because obviously, you need the item details, you may need the grid, and the relationship, but you may not need the managed items if you're especially not doing more of a vision controlled database. So obviously, this is all based on the roles. OK. So obviously, think about when you're creating the roles, what's going to be required for the end user, but also to an admin.

SAOIRSE COLGAN: So can I just add to that because Spirax, them, they rolled out Fusion Lifecycle in a very agile phased way. So with that, they didn't overwhelm the user. So when I mentioned earlier with milestones, sometimes I see customers turn them on too quickly and automate them without getting some lessons from using the workflow first of all. So you guys have applied it in a very phased way, and started with item details, workflows, and then, the next phase, turn on the milestones tab when they've had some good learnings from it.

ASHLEY HOOPER: As you can imagine, overwhelming anyone is scary. Would you like to be overwhelmed? So, on that note, for these tabs, do I have any questions? No? You're all quite comfortable with the tabs? Yeah?

AUDIENCE: When you use search, when you're actually searching through the project, why is it that it-- or is there a way to turn that on, that you can search through without the stress? When I'm searching this often, it doesn't search in the grid.

ASHLEY HOOPER: OK. So you want to be able to search in the grid.

AUDIENCE: Well, we use it as item codes for relations in our grid. So if I want to search a project that is hiding the formula number, since it's in the grid, but not in the first cut, with the ID.

SAOIRSE COLGAN: Do you want to take that?

BRIAN SCHANEN: Yeah. All right. So there's a couple of things that you can do to get-- you're right, it only searches in the item details. What I would suggest is, if you have a common look-up, if you have a common thing that you always run a search on, you create a report, and the report on the front end, you edit it runtime. Because all of the fields inside of the grid will appear. And then, if you know what that is and it's common, make that-- share it with the right people, and it's a custom on-demand query. And you can do that and it will search in the grid tab. But yeah, it's been noted. It's on a list somewhere.

SAOIRSE COLGAN: It's on the list.

BRIAN SCHANEN: And it's a big list.

ASHLEY HOOPER: It's a very big list. So we're going to come off the tabs and we're going to go onto the field. So all the items inside of it. So first thing we're going to start with is the Workspace Fields. Now, in here, they're very configurable. You can have different fields in different spaces. But you can also specify intersections. So you can, as I said before, you can group by sections.

Now, each of these fields have a different type associated with them. So you obviously were aware, you obviously got the auto number. Now this is just like from a database point of view, a very unique number. But it's unique to that workspace, in general. So you might have 1,000 items in there, but that auto number will always be completely unique. So you just increment and you can specify the implementation as much as you want. And you can also use a sequencer.

Integer. It's just a numeric value. It's not a float, so it can't have decimal points. So therefore, it's just 1-2-3.

A Float. Now, that has got a decimal point. Now, you have the capability of specifying what position you want. So you can specify if you went to four decimal places, five, six, preferably, just go for two.

Money. So your currency. Kind of just a-- how would you--

BRIAN SCHANEN: It's the superset. Basically, it's a float, it keeps the precision, but it [INAUDIBLE]. It actually has the implication in all of [INAUDIBLE].

ASHLEY HOOPER: Now a key note about Date. Date does not capture the time, it only captures actually the date. So if you do want to capture the time, we don't actually have a time field in there, so you can use Single Line Text field and capture it in there. And possibly use a regular expression. Now you'll get that in the handout. So I put a regular expression in there for you so we can basically control the time for you.

Now, Single Line Text field. It's basically just a raw stream. Now in this, you can specify how many characters you want it to be and you can really type anything you want. But, note to self, if you do, obviously, start making workspaces and you really utilize a lot of single line text fields, paragraphs, they're not really reportable. So this is something to note.

Now, there are special field types in there. They're in the same list. Now, you got Pick Lists. Now, you obviously, all quite-- some of you might understand what Pick List is, it's just like a combo box. So it's basically a predefined selection. Now there's multiple cases in which you can use them. So you have your Linked Pick List, you have your-- sorry. Yeah.

BRIAN SCHANEN: Linked Pick List.

ASHLEY HOOPER: Oh. Yeah. You have Linked Pick List. Yeah. So I had a blank [INAUDIBLE]. Now to derived. I like the derived, but I've also seen it massively overused. And you can abuse this feature. And what it can do is it can bloat your system because, what it does, basically, it pivots off like you're out to another work space. OK. Now the problem with this is that, it will bloat and the performance will drag. So use it carefully. You don't need the clone everything over. The reason would be, if you ever need to do a form of analytical change, you would obviously do an export of the tenants and do it outside of PLM. You shouldn't be merging all your data entries, just really one tenant. Pull over what you need.

Now Linked and Pick List, Derived is based off them. This is like a URL route to another workspace. So it's a two-part process. If you do want to use derived field, linking lists are required.

Now the Email. The email basically is like a file of data, so it will check that basically it is a valid email address. It can't tell you if it's actually a real email address. It can only tell you if it's valid. So it's got the @ symbol correctly and a dot.com.

Now the URL, that is like a hyperlink to a web address. So if you use a form of I-share or something, or any form of data storage, and you want to capture that, you can use that.

Now the CSV. Brian, do you want to--

BRIAN SCHANEN: Yeah, I'll take that. The CSV, you'll see it used when you have a bill of materials. And you have a comma separated value, is what it stands for. But often in a electronics BoM, bill of material, you'll have the values for the reference designators. So given something where what is it's reference, where is its position, and that has to be numbers, characters, comma, space. It's just more of a validation to make sure that it's reading right in a bill of material. Because if you get it wrong, it has implications. That's what this whole product is about, is accuracy of the bill of material. So it's niche, but it's actually something that, when we hand this to an upstream system, it's right. It's formulated right.

ASHLEY HOOPER: All right. Let's get down to business and start to talk about Computed Fields. Computer fields are very powerful, they're very good, they can do basic calculations in there. So do any of you utilize SQL or anything? OK.

So it's got basic functionality. So you can use T-SQLs and stuff like that. And you can calculate fields. So as long as you specify the field ID, which is the unique ID to that field, you can do basic calculations in their, combined, concatenate, you can do whatever you want. But you can also do a link to an attachment field, and you can actually pull back an image.

Now this one, Creating Default Values for a Field. For me, this drives great process, especially for the end user. For me, if I was building a work space, I wouldn't want-- say if I have a lot of pictures, and I'm using the auction value, so just look on yes/no, I would probably look to default that auto know, only because, if I've got maybe like 10 or 11, I need to user to tick, he might actually only want to say, yes, to two of them. So you should probably be looking to utilize how to default some values in, because of what you're doing then, is you're making the adoption process a lot more easy for them. And at the end of day, that's where it goes down to, isn't it? You want to adopt the workspace space. And it does drive really good behavior.

Now, the Unit of Measure. Now, is just a suffix, so when you specify say, an integer, you can say, "OK, I've got 10." Ten what, 10 pounds, gallons, meters, feet,

BRIAN SCHANEN: Stones? [LAUGHTER]

ASHLEY HOOPER: But it does switch between English and metric, depending on the user profile. And this can all be found when you go onto that tenant and you see in the top right hand corner, you can change your profile settings.

Now Validation. Now this is very powerful on the items detail tab. So what this allows you to do, basic validation. What's that? That's required. Is this field required? Yes. Therefore, before they create the item, the system's going to prompt them, say, you can't say this item, you haven't validated it, you haven't populated everything correctly, therefore, it will fail. But it will tell them, back to user, this is missing. This is missing. This is missing OK.

You've got Format Validations.

BRIAN SCHANEN: What's that?

ASHLEY HOOPER: Format validations.

BRIAN SCHANEN: Yeah. So formatting. Like if you throw a date field on there, it automatically puts the format on according to your preferences. So just make sure it's right. All these validations, the tip here is, it's there. When you make a field, take a look down there, and it gets even weirder. You have the two of three, but not greater than. You'll look down there and you'll think, why would you ever use that? Well, because you don't have to script that type of thing. And you don't have to have the users just use the honor system. You can actually drive them to fill out data better.

ASHLEY HOOPER: And that's the main bit there, the validation script. Don't overuse it, especially when, if you want to validate on Create, and stuff that, you definitely want these fields to be validated, and you need them to be there. It puts a nice little red asterisks next to the field, so that tells a user straight away. But this can only really be done on Create. You can't validate based on a different state. If you want to do it based on a state, then you still have to validate via the validation scripts.

Now you've got Uniqueness. So if you didn't want to use the auto number, which is basically, it's built-in sequencer, you need a number. You can create your own unique value and that will be unique in that whole entire workspace. So you don't have to use your auto number. I would recommend it, but you can create your own.

Now Cloning Fields. Now, how many of you have made a matrix before? No, if you've got loads of rows, you've got loads of columns, it's quite complicated to keep recreating it, recreating it. There's so much chance for human error to come in. So create it once, get the pivot correct, clone it, that way you can guarantee that the attributes will be in line, all you have to do is give it a new name.

Keep it Clean and Group by Sections. So this is something I really like. I don't like to clutter my workspace. Like, if I've got certain fields that are associated together, I will make my intersection for them. So it keeps-- if I've got address details-- so if I've got send to and a return, I will create two sections for that. So I'll send to and I got the return, and therefore, I know when the user wants to see it, they can see everything in that section associated to return or send to.

So, for me, it's just about cleanliness because, with that, you can also collapse sections, because it may not be mandatory to see it straight away. But there is another type of approach to it. Now you can create these sections. When you utilize work flows, you can associate a number to the workflow. So this is state 01, state 02, state 03. You can create your sections in mind. This is a practice that we use, Saoirse showed us.

So basically, what we do is, we will say, in section 01, just in the title. And then we know that on this state, all the values are in there. It's required.

SAOIRSE COLGAN: Yes, so just-- that's just a tip on best practices. So it's just more intuitive for the user if you reference the state name and give it a related section name, so that, on the larger workspace, like an MPI, if I'm out a certain costing state or something I just need to know that I'm going to that section that says costing and completing those attributes.

ASHLEY HOOPER: The Descriptor. So this is the name of the record. Now, the descriptor, by default, allows you to have four values. I do recommend you only really only use two. So when you're searching for these items, it will search the whole entire descriptor, and not a specific value. So if you're searching for like a part number, make sure you use a part number and maybe a title associated with them. Don't put anything else really. The option's there, you can do it, but in terms of search ability, it obviously gets a bit more complicated.

So the fields we added. So you create in a nice derived field. That isn't just for the items detail tab. You can also add it to the BoM, you can add it to the grid, you can add it to linked items, or manage items tab. So you can actually derive information in the managed items tab, if you want. You can have it all associated.

Now, back to the Derived Fields again. So yes, you can use derived fields, and I do advocate you use them. Because it does stop for duplicate data dump. So, how to use them. First of all, if you've got a linked pick list, you specify the item you want to do to the associated workspace, and then, you create that pivot. And with that pivot, you can extract any field you want from there. Now yes, the problem will be that if you keep doing it, you will bloat your workspace. So, as I said before, use it wisely.

So Picklists. These types of picklists here, you can create static picklists, on demand, or you can create an nice picklist based on a workspace. So if you want to build a classification, you can do a nice classification based on a workspace. But you can also, before you actually save it, you can apply a filter to it. So say if you have an employee database. Now in there, you only want to show in this list, manufacturing, you don't need to create a new workspace for just manufacturing users. You can just specify a filter in there, a check box just to say, yes, OK, I just want to show manufacturing.

So the Filtered Pick Lists. So this is, if you associated it to a workspace, what you can do is, you can classify down. So if you have a freeway classification, instead of 1-2-3, if you click on one, it'll fill with the list on the next one and so on and so forth. So you actually can condense down your pick list, and it makes it a lot more traceable.

Now again, the Link Pick List. What this is just a soft relationship. So take your relationship tab, where you have your bidirectional, you got your unidirectional. Those are hard relationships links effectively. But what this is, like a soft relationship. So it's not directly related, but it has the ability to see the record.

Now the Field Descriptors. So what this is is just the description associated to the field ID that you are creating. Now this can be very useful to an end user, especially when you start to use validations. So for example, if you did start to use a regular expression validation all it will do is tell you that the format is invalid, is incorrect. But if you don't tell the user what type of format that she is meant to be, so if it was time, they're going to get lost. So just specify. If you're going to do time, HH:MM, minutes. And that does allow for easier data entry, especially if they know what they need to type in the first time.

So what? Do we have any questions on that? No?

SAOIRSE COLGAN: So for those of you that know or don't know, you do have the ability to hide your states. Sometimes this encourages some focus with users. So I've seen when customers have money cancel states or points that really de-clutters the workflow. You can hide those. Also there's a process here at the end of your change request. Does the user really need to see that we're pushing records out to ERP? No.

Yeah, the other thing to be mindful of is, when you delete a state for records that are sitting in that state, as well, they're going to be orphaned with that workflow. So you need to either push them forward or roll them back. And when you're managing records like that, in some instances, I know people just hide the state and keep those records in that state.

Should we go to the next slide? OK. So you can also lock your state. You have the ability to lock one record per workflow. Always, best practice is, if you're not utilizing the lock state at any review point on your workflow, lock it at the end of each workflow, I would say. For security reasons, what users don't always know is, once it goes into the locked state from that point forwards, the item is locked, the tabs are locked. But should you return to a previous state, the items, you don't have the ability to edit direct for it again.

ASHLEY HOOPER: However, to actually get the sections to lock, it's a two-part process. You have to specify workflow locking on the section.

SAOIRSE COLGAN: OK and then your Manage States. So that is where work is done. Be very careful with where your positioning your managed state, because that's when you're related item, your version controlled item, the lifecycle changes. And no, end users will say, "Oh, can we can we undo that?" No, you can't. The lifecycle is actually changed, it's changed versions, so be very careful where you position that managed state because that's when the changes you've committed. OK.

State escalations these are really, really powerful. One of my favorites. And this was a feature that was added to the product from when I was a customer myself. I saw it come into the product and I remember, we had an instance where somebody had gone on leave and forgotten to delegate their work, and it was at a really, really critical state in our process, and we missed a deadline as a result of it. And I think it was about three months later, what came into the product was state escalations.

So for those critical points in your workflow, bear in mind that it's a user function, it's not an admin function for somebody to go and delegate their records. You have to think what's the impactibles of somebody not delegating their actions at a certain point. So escalations, you have the ability to, if something is not actioned in a predefined or would in some time constraints, you have the option to run the script, which could notify that user's manager that they haven't performed this action or delegate it to somebody else via permissions. So these are hugely, hugely powerful. And I would say, whenever I create a workflow, I then consider what are the really, really critical points, and where do we need to leverage escalations.

Transition Passwords . So not everybody uses these, but I have seen, particularly with Med device companies and stuff when you need that extra level of security. And even before going into a managed item state again, it's that prompt to a user. Are you sure you were doing this? We're committing, so this is a feature which I don't think customers leverage enough. Because if it is that critical-- I've seen stuff moved into the managed item state and afterwards, users say, "Oh, I didn't mean to do that." Well, you've just changed the lifecycle. So again, it's that kind of additional prompt, are you positive? Yes. OK. This is you. Yeah.

BRIAN SCHANEN: All right. So talking about reports. We did a report in class on Tuesday. Reports are baked right into the system. You don't need to do anything. Basically, it's right there. As a general rule, though, I like to say, if you have a workspace, you should have a report. The minute you make a workspace and you get it reasonably sorted out, you should have a report for it.

If it's a workflow workspace, a really easy report to do is just records by-- xy records by their workflow state. Just get that out there. And the reason for that is, if you're going to go through the work to make a workspace, be the new product introduction, or item to BoMs, or one of those quiet behind-the-scenes ones, like description generators, or those, you should have a report.

Even the ones that they're not the fanciest ones, or the admin, the reference. They should at least have round-trip export in the tenants that we build at Autodesk and hand out, the latest generation, you'll see the EX. So it's a way of getting data out. You get data out and then-- Ashley, go to the next slide-- and then-- oh yeah, that's it. Basically, get data out and then you can run the import and you can clone the import. So there's actually a procedure that you can go through, and it's not just admins.

You could actually-- there it is-- you could actually have a power user or anybody with the right level of responsibility in the system do that. And it's a way to send out a standardized report and manage it, manipulate inside of Excel, and then, bring it right back in. So these two kind of go together and, I guess we spliced another slide there. You can't stop making slides sometimes.

Anyway, so Change Report Ownership. This is something that came along about 18 months ago inside of the product. And it was sorely needed because people come and go at companies and you'd have reports generated by the prior PLM admin and all of a sudden, oops, now you have to go and get that user ID. And now you have the ability to do this if you're an admin. So as long as all the admins at a site get along, this usually isn't a problem.

But you might go into your tenant one day and say, "Hey, yes share it with me, but I'm going to take it back." Well, basically you can go in and just click on change and it'll be open to anybody else inside of the system to be the primary owner of that. What does that mean? You can go in and edit that report.

All right. So this is one, this snuck in, I think, about May of this year. So you're familiar with scripting and the way things were, you always had to either mash everything together or use underscores or some other characters on script names. That's fine for us PLM admins behind the scenes. We can deal with that mentally. But, on the front end, when you have a push button script that you might want to run, you'll look at this and, "get username info and update partner--" didn't make any sense. Well now, you can actually put a space in, so like, "product on edit," actually that still doesn't really say what it does. But now you can actually put a nice near sentence case thing for an end user to just hit that push button script.

And it works with both. I know it's a modern mode screen cap, but it works in classic as well, task reset and things like that. So do that. I actually, in the latest tenant I went through, took the action scripts because these are the ones that are going to be the front end facing and renamed and decrypted and actually, some of them, I had to just like ask Saoirse, I don't know really what this does. So we basically just went through, renamed, so do that. You're your end users will-- well, if they've been using it for a while, they're probably already immune to it. Next.

So Pre-conditioned Filters. This is something relatively recent. This was pushed in the last release. So this has a huge impact on my outstanding work. We love our acronyms so, M.O.W, my outstanding work. And the calculation of M.O.W. on the front end. Basically, instead of using pre-conditioned scripts-- every time you go to the workspace and go to a record, and you look at the workflow type, it has to calculate. Can you do it or can't you do it? And that stacks up. That actually adds up all of the precondition and all of that.

You can actually now take that pre-conditioned script out and just use the pre-conditioned filter. So it's going to look at a multi-select linking pick list, or either users all by name or, if you have another workspace that you're controlling all of your-- if you build up approval boards, you build up basically routing groups. You can have it go on looking. So it has a marked improvements. So Martin, what was the speed of this? Is it 2X improvement?

MARTIN: I think it's [INAUDIBLE].

BRIAN SCHANEN: Yeah, in our perfect Autodesk testing. But what you're going to see is actually it's going to be--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

BRIAN SCHANEN: Yeah.

SAOIRSE COLGAN: Might I ask-- sorry, who's using this?

BRIAN SCHANEN: Yeah, it might be a not--

SAOIRSE COLGAN: Yeah, I just-- for some of my customers, I've been trying to migrate them to [INAUDIBLE], yes.

BRIAN SCHANEN: So there's a blog post out. We have a new Fusion Lifecycle blog, and we'll bring it up towards the end. And so there was a-- Michelle Stone put out a post about this. So I don't know that it reached everywhere, but I think the next step is maybe how to retrofit, how to go into your existing tenants or sandboxes and unhook the pre-conditioned script and add this one back in. There's a small procedure to it, but it's pretty basic.

Plus, if you're a recent customer, you actually might have the pre-conditioned scripts in there and we can write up a tutorial and show you exactly how to do that. But it's something that you'd want to put on any workflow, anywhere where you have approval and you have people signing off and, something for somebody to do, leverage this. It's right inside of the system.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

BRIAN SCHANEN: Yeah. Yeah. It is owner, yeah. It's a good one. All right. So couple of tips. So I know Ash put together a lot of these tips and actually, a really good handout. I do have that up on the screen there. But I thought I would just put in a little plug for our Modern mode. So Fusion Lifecycle has a shiny new look to it. And as we were writing the Modern UI, we took and basically, evaluated every step, every process, every click, and can we make it better. So these tips are about what's in Modern, and what you can do in Modern.

Now not everybody is ready to go to Modern, but when you do, you're going to get things like, on the left search view, which we basically just call it the workspace view now, you can actually go in and have-- you always had the ability to have and see put in filters and what do you want to see, choose your columns, and put in filters. But now you can go and filter and/or.

So that is going to significantly reduce the churn of having to go and sort through the left search views by putting in an or statement. It's just those little things that, again, it just makes life easier for not only the admins, but the end user. So you can see down here, you can or and basically stack it up like that. All right.

So some acronym time. And again, we love our acronyms. We have one, if you're ever on a call and you hear CRUD. All right? That means create, read, update, delete. Your basic four permissions on any given tab. OK? So let's talk about C.R.U.D.

All right. So C.R.U.D. in classics. So in this case, create, read, update, delete. So close your eyes and put yourself in PLM and you want to go and add a row to the grid tab. Oh no, you want to delete a row. Now you just need to change that value. There used to be three different ways to do it. We had three paradigms really, add, or get out of it, edit, and then go and get out of that or, delete with a red X.

So what we have now, again, in Modern mode, so the next slide. We have what's known as Cue Mode, and it's going to appear anywhere inside of Modern mode that has a grid-like columns and rows. So for instance, well, the grid tab. And I have a couple of other images on here. So what you can see is, you go into an edit mode. Basically, you're going to queue up all of your changes.

Whether you're adding, so this is a complete net new, or making a modification, or just completely removing, it's going to give you, like, this is what you're about to get, strike-through, font, and bold, and the little dog ears, right here. And then you do everything and you commit. So no longer three different ways. Because people can spend a lot of time going in and building up a grid tap. Actually, next screen. Yeah, so this is actually the C.R.U.D. on the grid tab. It's nice to just have this, look at it, it's a quicker way, and I think a more streamlined way to work. And a lot of this was built off of just user research over the years with PLM360 or Fusion Lifecycle.

So next one. Project Management Tab. It's got C.R.U.D. and it's also-- they redid the Gantt charts, so if you switch over from the Classic to the Modern mode, the Gantt chart is still there. It's actually a little bit better. So you can actually change the time span, and you can move around these. You can take a full Gantt, half Gantt, or turn off completely. So I think the controls, the way it renders out, it's actually a lot nicer. If you've not seen this yet, I'd highly encourage you to take a look. I'm actually going to show you how to do that.

All right. C.R.U.D. on the Bill of Materials tab. I'm going to just keep saying that, just so you know. Basically, if you go into edit mode and you want to take a row out, it'll highlight. If you want to go and modify and make any other changes, you can stack all of this up, commit, and there's your edits. You don't have to go through and-- because people spend a lot of time building a grid or a Bill of Material. You spend a lot of time in there. It's nice to just work a little bit quicker. Next slide.

All right. Oh, some other fun new features. So we now have the compare. OK. So Bill of Materials compares is a big deal. That's what this system really does is bill of material and BoM management. And it's good to be able to say a bill of material and either former versions of itself, future versions of itself. But it was always in the structured mode. But now we can unnest that, flatten it out, and do a compare on it. So this is one of those new little things that's in Modern only. It's not in Classic. But it's a good tip, if it's something that you do a lot of. People go in and compare and that's the reason we have this product, new version and revise things. Next one.

Oh, so this one's nice. So if you've ever sent out an Excel spreadsheet from Fusion Lifecycle and you go in to open it up, it's HTML, and it gives you-- it looks like you've done something bad. You didn't do anything bad. It's just, there could be a better way. When we BoM export from Modern mode in a bill of material, it, of course, gives you a spreadsheet. But we're using a new provider on it. And the spreadsheet that it gives you is interactive. So if you go and click on one of these cells, that'll actually take you and take you to that record right inside of Fusion Lifecycle.

So sometimes we need to give this out because Excel is the standard currency of data management and PLM and even ERP. But now if you give this to somebody, and they have a login, actually they have access to Fusion Lifecycle, they can go right to that particular one record. So it makes it interactive. It's not just a one-way street. You can actually from here, get back in, so that is a super fun fact right there.

The Attachments tab. Attachments tab, we had it in Classic. Now in Modern mode, it's nearly the same. We can go in and build a folder, but you can upload a new version and we can lock. So you no longer have to check out just to reserve it. You can actually just lock it. So it's a little bit different paradigm built on feedback from customers, our customer advisory board, specifically, on this one, and it's just a nicer, I think, a little bit cleaner way to work. But it's there. It's just new.

Next one. Managed Items. So managed items, in other words, this is, if you have an item or bill of material or a document and you need to just release that, you need to go in quick-- and the word quick is like right in there, it's called Quick Create. It's a noun/verb way of working. Like I have this thing and I need to release it or obsolete it or do something to it, that's the verb. You can actually go right from the noun to the verb via the Quick Create in. And it's a faster way of working. It takes you through a couple of windows, think like a wizard, and before you know it, you're on the ECO or the DCO, you're choosing the lifecycle state and you're ready to just go and move it forward.

It's ideal for any time that you'd want to take something and just get it to rev 1 or rev a, that initial revision. How quick can I get there, and reduces the number of clicks. I was talking to UX person and I think it went from 24 down to 7. So they took a look and automated lots of those little things. Because that stacks up over the day.

What else? Managed Items. So this one is nice. I know we would script this or we could automate this in Classic mode. But this Bulk Lifecycle Change-- so picture of a very big assembly bill of material, and you add it to a change order. We've had the ability to add all of its children and grandchildren and great-grandchild. We've had that. But if you've ever done that, it's a significant assembly and you want to just release everything, you have to go row by row in Classic, and go, choose the lifecycle, choose the lifecycle.