Under the Hood

Feature Friday: More Bright Ideas Put Into Action in PLM 360

The May release of PLM 360 bought several new features suggested by the community via the IdeaStation.  Enhancements were made to the preview functionality as well as having Project Management available through scripting.  Thanks to all who kudo’d and commented – Product Management really appreciates it!

Now you can customize the Item Preview Data Card – by default is only displays fields from the first section of the Item Details tab.  To customize what your end-users see, go to the Workspace Manager and edit the field – you can then check off ‘visible on preview’:

Note once you’re customized fields you do have to go in and select every field you want displayed.  Now when I preview – the Severity field is included:

Now onto using scripting for project management – a quick example to show adding a task to a project.  You can customize the Task workspace and add a Project field (I called it RELATED_PROJECT as you can see in the script) – put a simple action script on the behavior for the workspace and if there’s a project associated with the task, it will add that task to it:

The syntax for this and a few more examples can be found on the IdeaStation link above or visit the Scripting Reference on our Wiki. 

You can read more about What’s New in the latest release of PLM 360 and look forward to us covering the others in upcoming Feature Fridays!

--Michelle

Photo: Hey Paul

Tip Tuesday! A Belated “Administrative Professionals Day” Gift for the PLM 360 Admins

Our new release of PLM 360 over the weekend included some big changes to the Administration menu – the redesign brings vast improvements to the usability.  I have to admit it took me a bit to get used to it, but now that I’ve been playing with it and using it in my own PLM admin duties, I’m a happy camper.

It’s nice to be able to access the exact area you need from the main cascading menu – fewer picks and clicks are always a good thing.

I’m not a big fan of flowers (other than the wildflower variety seen while hiking!) so I much prefer software changes that make administering PLM 360 easier for my “PLM Administrators Day” gift {ok, so it’s not a real holiday…. yet }

Enjoy!

--Michelle Stone

Photo: Justin Dolske

And there really is an “Administrative Professionals Day” holiday!

Feature Friday: Having Fun in PLM 360 with BOM Effectivity Dates Yet?

A few weeks ago we talked about our new date effectivity feature in PLM 360 in “Are you Affected by Effectivity”  Bastien, from our support team, wrote a detailed example of how this works to give some more insight in how to use this new feature.  Let’s say you are planning some future changes to your Spur Gear product and decided to make a change to the Gear Box part to go along with it.

The changes to the product require some facility changes, so the plan is to make that in a month from now. This can be easily done in PLM 360 thanks to the new BOM effectivity feature. All that is required is to create a new change order, add the Gear Box part as the only affected item and set its effectivity date to be in a month from now.

After completing the change order, the Spur Gear assembly BOM will now show revision B for the Gear Box part after changing the BOM view date to a month from now.

However, soon after that, warranty claims start coming requiring an emergency change to the same Gear Box part taking effect immediately.

This is also easily taken care of in PLM 360 by creating yet another change order for that part to move it to revision C with an effectivity date set to a couple of days from now.

This may raise some high brows since the next revision C will have an effectivity date earlier than its previous revision B. This is however not a problem due to PLM 360 high flexibility in BOM area.

Changing the BOM view dates around in assembly shows that revision A is superseded:

… that revision C is in Production:

… and that revision B is superseded:

But most importantly if you navigate to the Gear Box item itself, you will find that superseded revision B was never in effect.

In addition, this same method could be used to accelerate delivery plans by going with a different supplier, or fixing mistakes.

Hope that helps you get a better understanding of how it all works! 

--Michelle Stone

I’m going to need to see some ID

What’s the best way to identify your assembly components in the Inventor Vault Browser?  I mean, these structures get big and it’s not always clear what is what…

Some time back we made this a lot easier by implementing component selection highlighting (select it in the model and it highlights in the Vault browser or vice versa), then we added Vault options in the right click context menus that meant you could carry out Vault tasks direct from the Inventor structure browser or the model itself.  If this was still not clear you could always use datacards as a tool to cycle through the model and find what you are looking for.

A release or two back we started to provide more information inside the Vault Browser itself, giving users the ability to add limited Vault properties to the instance names, now you could append the default instance name with the document lifecycle state and revision.  This was a great help in making decisions about file access and modification but did not address actual file identification. 

New in 2014 we have extended the browser properties and made this completely flexible – users can now select to add any additional Vault properties or choose an alternate display name all together.

This last option is ideal for companies using automatic file numbering which provides a nicely uniform but altogether indecipherable file identifier – using part number, stock number or description value instead of a file name in this case should make it much simpler to identify browser instances and reduce the stumbling around in semi-darkness.

-Allan

Tip Tuesday! Unraveling the Mysteries of BOM Roll-ups in PLM 360

Well, I think I looked at one too many cat pictures on the Internet and started to turn into one… seems I’ve spent the last 5 days sleeping like 16+ hours a day and looking for sunny spots to warm up in, so I never got around to posting a ‘Feature Friday’ last week for you guys.  My antibiotics have finally kicked in, so today’s tip will be how to use one of the features from last month’s release, Advanced BOM Roll-up functionality.  This allows you to easily calculate cost, weight or other key data.

Let’s say you want to roll-up weight information – if you don’t already have a field capturing that data – you can add it to the item details and also to the BOM tab (watch the video for step by step instructions).

PLM TV - Bill of Material Roll Up: Administrator Briefing

Once you have that field in your workspace, you can easily record the values. Having this information at your fingertips on the BOM tab can be a real time saver!  It can do the totals for you real time.

Something to keep in mind – you can do roll-ups on the following data types only: float, integer, money, date or check box. Also, the data type on both the field and the roll-up need to be the same.

--Michelle Stone

Photo: Dr. Hemmert

Good Ideas!

With the release of Autodesk Vault 2014 we see a number of the IdeaStation postings from the last year being implemented. Obviously we would love to implement every suggestion (well, maybe not EVERY suggestion) but we are off to a good start with 12 customer requests making the cut, which at the time of defining the release represented a good percentage of the total number. 

Over the coming weeks we will detail a number of the new enhancements in Vault 2014 but some of those we can cross of the IdeaStation list include the hugely popular “improvements to job processor” request, 4 Revit improvements and the seemingly obvious iFeature support.

Moving forward with the IdeaStation concept we hope to increase the number of implemented solutions with each release – looking at the current projections we have 13 ideas accepted and a large number (71) under consideration for future releases.  If your idea didn’t make it – hang in there, if you have a new idea go and post it – we really do build this product for you!

- Allan

Photo: crdotx

Tip Tuesday! When to Implement Your Access Control Model in PLM 360

Tomorrow’s PLM Talk will about one of my favorite topics (no, not cats….) Access Controls!

Last summer I talked a bit on why the topic is near and dear to my heart in How to Fall in Love with PLM and tomorrow I’m going to condense the AU Virtual class I did last year, ‘Do You Have the “Need to Know” More About Security Permissions in Autodesk® PLM 360?’ to about 1/2 the time and walk through some key concepts around correctly using security permissions in PLM 360 so you can make sure that everyone can see the data they need to see, but only the data they need to see.

One tip I’d like to share here is a mention of when is the “best” time to implement the user/group/roles set up.  I look at it as really coming into play after you’ve done the bulk of your functional implementation (defining and developing workspaces).  In the beginning it’s sufficient to open up workspaces and focus on functionality and later work on creating more succinct roles once that’s more stable.

{guess this is where the disclaimer comes into place – this is an “IMHO” bit and by no means a hard and fast rule!  One of the greatest advantages to PLM 360 is the ‘Have it Your Way’ attitude – you’re not confined to strict rules of how and when you have to implement functionality or define your access model.}

You’ll notice towards the end of the project timeline, there is very little going on in the way of changes to the data model, yet you’ll still be refining access controls, based on more testing and feedback as you involve more folks in the validation process.

If you can’t join us for tomorrow for the webinar, there’s always plenty of PLM Talk on the Discussion Group or our Facebook page!

--Michelle Stone

Feature Friday: Getting Attached to your Items in PLM 360

This Feature Friday post will uncover a nifty feature in the Attachments tab. For review, the Attachments tab is where you can drag and drop files onto an Item. Anything that supports the item and has a file extension including documents, images, etc. is viable here. To see this in action, watch the Drag and Drop Attachments with PLM 360 video up on PLM TV.

Now for the best part: Just about every PLM workspace has the Attachments tab enabled, making it very popular and useful. You can spot this in various workspaces, lurking amongst the other tabs, housing any files that support the record.

Now, the nature of PLM 360 is that it’s a collection of processes that relate together all necessary items into a powerful solution - as seen below in the constellation view when you click the Visualize icon. From here, you can get to any other linked Item, view the data in the tabs, etc. But wait, it gets better…

If you have Attachments in those related Items, you don’t necessarily need to navigate away to that other Workspace to view them. PLM 360 provides shortcuts to related attachments, right within the primary Item you’re looking at.

This is a great feature, and saves a little time in navigation to other locations within PLM 360 just to open & view attached files.

-Brian Schanen

AU 2013 Call for Proposals

I know what you’re thinking: Wow. It’s that time already? The answer is Yes. Autodesk University Call for Proposals site is live! I am excited already for AU 2013 and what we will do on the PLM and Data Management track. But I need to hear ideas from you – the PLM and Vault community out there.

So, for inspiration here’s what you do: If you have an AU Online account, go check out what went down last year at AU2012 for PLM and Vault. It was everywhere, on the tip of everyone’s tongue, in other tracks beyond just the PLM/DM one. Note the customer lead classes too – panels, roundtables, lectures. We’re looking for real world best practices, case studies, and of course the deep dives into technical features.

“What’s in it for me?” you may ask. In addition to the free 3 day pass to AU, there is the networking and expertise sharing that all find invaluable. Beyond that, I’ve worked closely each year as a team with all the PLM/DM track speakers to share ideas and perform dry runs of presentations – all optional. I’d welcome you to be part of the PLM/DM teaching team at AU. Whether you’re a customer, reseller, independent consultant, we would love to hear your class proposal.

The Call for Proposals site closes May 19. Be sure to look over the Tips for Success and Proposal Checklist on this page, this provides excellent guidance to make your proposal the best it can be.

http://au.autodesk.com/?nd=call_for_proposals

-Brian Schanen

Feature Friday: Feel Secure with PLM 360

While ‘ubiquitous access’ is cool when it comes to PLM 360 (I know I enjoy being able to promote workflows when I’m out and about!), admins may want to restrict certain groups from accessing content when in public areas.  Now with the new IP Address Whitelisting it’s possible to configure network IP addresses so that folks in certain groups can’t access the site when outside those addresses.  This is key for sensitive information, say sales and marketing information, you don’t want folks to access while sipping on their latte at a coffee shop.

Brian Schanen put together a brief video going into more detail on how this works:

IP Address Whitelisting

It’s pretty easy to set up– go to ‘Administration’ –> ‘Users Groups Roles’ –> ‘Groups’ tab.  Select and edit the group you want to restrict, then configure the Group ID Access – be sure to save your changes! 

Now if a member of that group tries to access the PLM 360 tenant from an address outside the range, they won’t get in.  They will get a message letting them know why:

Want to learn more about access controls in PLM 360 beyond this?  Be sure to sign up for our PLM Talk on this topic scheduled for May 1, 2013.  We’ll talk more about using the security permissions in PLM 360 so you can make sure that everyone can see the data they need to see, but only the data they need to see!

--Michelle Stone

Photo: Klearchos Kapoutsis