Development Part Lifecycle

The Part Development policy is the default for all creations of type Part. The Designer or Senior Designer has the ability to create new parts with the Part Development policy or the EC Part (production) policy. See EC Part Lifecycle.

The purpose of the Part Development policy is to allow engineering the ability to design new parts in a controlled environment until one of the revisions is released to Production.

The development process allows for multiple design iterations to be created (Revisions) along with ad-hoc reviews at any time in the part lifecycle. In order words, a development part may have multiple revisions active and not released at the same time.

The following describes the states included in the Part Development lifecycle:

Preliminary

New parts and new part revisions are created in the Preliminary state. The Preliminary state is used to generate the "defining documentation," drawing print, for the part. At this state no revisions can be created. Only the owner and any other user granted access (for example, Responsible Design Organization) can view the part.

The Design Engineer must perform the following tasks at this state:

• Make visible to selected users (Design Responsibility)
• Add/update attributes
• If Item is an Assembly:
• Add Items to Structure
• Add EBOM Attributes

As the Part leaves the Preliminary state, the following Checks are fired:

• At least one Part Specification connection or Reference Document connection must exist regardless of the object type related. For the Part Specification the object type can be a drawing print, CAD model, or CAD drawing. For the Reference Document, the related object type can be any Document (subtype) or a Sketch.
• The related document must have at least one file checked in.
• At least one Design Responsibility connection must exist regardless of the object type related. Design Responsibility can be assigned only to organizations (subsidiaries, business units, or departments) within the host company.

Review

This is a lightweight "Peer Review" process that does not require any lifecycle signature. The owner of the part can promote to the Review state without any signature or ad-hoc route. Customers can easily add new signatures using Business Modeler or add a trigger that will force the existence of a route.

At this state the part cannot be revised nor changed by the owner. If the owner needs to make any changes to the part, the part must be demoted back to the Preliminary state. Visibility to the part remains the same as in the Preliminary state: Owner and organization with Design Responsibility for the part. The owner is limited to "view only" at this state. No changes to the Part metadata are allowed on this state.

Complete

The Complete state is the state where the part can be revised for another cycle of design changes or the part can be formally prepared for the Production process.

At this state the part is revisable by the owner. Visibility remains to the owner and the RDO given access at the Preliminary state. The owner is limited to "view only" at this state; no modifications are allowed except revision of the part.