Under the Hood

What's New in Fusion Lifecycle: June 2017

Our new release is hot, hot, hot!  Or maybe I’m thinking about the weather here in Portland last week.  We hit triple digits! Here is what's new in the June 2017 update:

• New Copy Item Ability for Modern Interface

You can now copy items in the modern interface with the Clone command. Copying an item creates a new item with all of the source item's details, including all tab data, such as attachments, BOM listings, and relationships.

• New Description View When Creating an Item

You can now view the description of a field when creating an item in the modern interface.

• Workspace Now Displays the Number of Items

You can now view the number of items in a workspace.

• New Escalation Time Range

Escalation time can now be set to 999 days or fewer.

We also resolved quite a few known issues – if you had an open support case, that team should be following up.  In the meantime, here’s a list:

Resolved Issues

• Email notifications sent in the modern interface are now cleaner, do not contain HTML tags, and have a more readable subject line.
• Updating or saving an item containing an OnEdit script that updates a field used as a pivot for a derived field is now faster.
• The bookmarks panel in the dashboard is no longer empty after navigating it for a second time.
• The item.addBOM method in scripting no longer lets you create duplicate entries in the database.
• Users can now see a deleted item with the revision value of "Superseded."
• The loading time is now faster for BOM tabs containing multiple columns.
• Users are no longer logged out of the system during certain workflows.
• Effectivity dates for affected items no longer show yesterday's date when you release an item today.
• Users no longer have to refresh the browser to see bookmarks in the modern interface.
• A value of False can now be used when setting an Is Latest Version or Is Working Version filter on the Items and BOMs workspace.
• The Workflow Action dialog and Filter menu in the modern interface no longer shudder in certain conditions.
• In the modern interface, an attachment is no longer added twice if a user double-clicks on the add button in the Attachments tab.
• The details page for the Quick Create ECO workflow in the modern interface now loads correctly after creation.
• Importing users all by name in a pick-list multi-select no longer produces an error.

-- Michelle Stone, Fusion Adoption Team

Fusion Lifecycle Quick Tip: Using the App Store

In his book Steal Like An Artist, Austin Kleon spends 160 pages using some quirky illustrations to convey his deep belief that nothing is original. The fact is, that isn't really a bad thing.  For engineers - how important is it to use existing designs and data when repeating a similar project, only saving the real ingenuity for the critical parts of the projects?  Or to reuse all those specs, datasheets and vendor docs that were painstakingly collected?

Fusion Lifecycle has some pre-built workspaces designed to save you time when starting out a new workspace or when you need to track additional data.  Check out the short video below where I explain how to install and use a pre-built app from the Fusion Lifecycle app store.  So, please, feel free to steal these like an engineer.

- Tyler Beck, Technical Marketing

 

Tip Tuesday! Tracking Workspace Changes in Fusion Lifecycle

Imagine trying to track every single change you and your team made to a record,  bill of materials, or a project in Fusion Lifecycle.  It sounds like a horrible job for a human and a perfect one for a cloud-based robot. So, how do you view that?

Within any workspace that you have enabled the change log tab, you can track all the changes.  Sort the changes by column and compare the changes with the bright colored descriptions! Not too shabby! 

Check out the following video to see it in action.

- Tyler Beck, Technical Marketing

Tip Tuesday! Save Time with Filtered Picklists in Fusion Lifecycle

Save time and eliminate user error with filtered picklists in Fusion Lifecycle. This is an intelligent picklist manager, and is dependent on selections made previously.

If we were talking about soft drinks and you said "Cola" then you would expect only Coke, Pepsi, Dr Pepper, RC Cola and any other black, carbonated sugar delivery device to show up on the list.  (By the way, if you recognized RC cola, you are not a millennial, just FYI.)

A real example that you might use in Fusion Lifecycle?  Zipcodes.  Grab an existing list, and import zip codes into a reference workspace - this gives you the ability to automatically find the information once the state and city is filled out.

Check out the video below to see it in use!

It’s also covered well in Bryan and Michelle’s excellent class from Autodesk University: 13 - 19 minutes

- Tyler Beck, Technical Marketing

Tip Tuesday! Permission Best Practices for Fusion Lifecycle

Join us next week for another PLM Talk - Connecting Workspaces in Fusion Lifecycle (Wed, Apr 26, 2017 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT.  One topic we’ll cover in detail is Access and Permissions - i.e. how to setup what / who is allowed for each relationship in the system.  Today’s tip is to make sure you follow a logical naming convention (like what’s delivered in your out-of-the-cloud tenant):

There are more Best Practices in the Help guide around permissions – be sure to check out the bit about a separate role for admin permissions like ‘Override Revision Control Locks’.

- Michelle Stone

Tip Tuesday: Exploring the Products Workspace in Fusion Lifecycle

Hey readers,

I'm curious if you are currently using the products / projects workspace in Fusion Lifecycle - that nifty little setup that lets you manage the stuff in your product beyond the bill of materials.  Once the bill of materials is done, there are still tons of product related tasks, milestones and information that should be collected in one place.  The tasks should be viewable in a single location, along with a clear idea of who owns it and if they are running late. This will save you from having so many update meetings…that is the intent anyways.

Milestones are helpful for overall health of the product launch - having attachments for every photo, note, and email that is pertinent to the launch.

Check out the following video for an overview of how to use the products workspace.

- Tyler Beck, Technical Marketing

Feature Friday: Exploring the Products Workspace in Autodesk PLM 360

Hey PLM 360 fans. There’s a new batch of videos up on PLM TV highlighting the out-of-the-cloud applications within Autodesk PLM 360. The first one – Exploring the Products Workspace in Autodesk PLM 360 kicks off the playlist series, and features the Products Workspace.

The ‘Products’ workspace in the PLM 360 tenant provides a top-down view of all of the information on existing products, and those in development, in one single place.
Comprehensive information on the Product, its current status, and its development process is summarized across the various tabs in this workspace.

 

-Brian Schanen

PLM Tip of the Week - Linking Workspaces in PLM 360

“That rug really tied the rooms together,”   -The Dude Lebowski

Today’s post will cover some best practices in tying linking data together within PLM 360. Items from one Workspace can call upon and provide a link to items in another Workspace. There are a number of ways to do this, and the advantages include ease of navigation, removing duplicate data entry, and (intended) transparency of information within PLM 360. First, we’ll examine the use of picklists to draw Workspaces together:

Linking Picklists

A Picklist is a drop down of predefined values used during data entry. They display in a variety for forms such as single choice, radio button, check box, and multiple choice to name a few. The advantage is the predefined nature of them, allowing user to select rather than type in values. A Linking Picklist takes that a step further and provides access to Items in another Workspace of your choice. During configuration of a field, choosing Linking Picklist will lookup values available in the other Workspace and establish a link, thus the name.

What’s even better is that Picklists are global in your PLM tenant. Meaning good, well built Picklists that reference other Workspaces can be used over again in another field, another Workspace.

 

Relationships Tab

The Relationships tab is yet another way to establish links between Workspaces. This tab is enabled through adding permissions on the role of a Workspace. Once enabled, anyone with permission can add a direct link to an Item from another Workspace and establish this as either bi-directional or uni-directional from the active to the related Item.

Workspace Relationships setting on the Workspace

Building upon the previous paragraph, the Workspace Relationship setting on each Workspace allow the administrator to link multiple Workspaces to each other. Certain tabs actually lend themselves to Item relationships as in the image below. Project Management tabs need other projects, tasks, and activities to link to, forming a project gantt chart. Bill of Materials needs BoM items, Revisioning Workspaces need Revision controlled items, and the Relationships tab needs well, something to relate to.

Scripting

Finally, Workspaces can be tied together through the use of an action script that spawns a new item in a difference Workspace. This in turn provides a direct link back to the item from whence it came. A great example of this is an Inspection that leads to a Non conformance, which leads to a Corrective action.

This can even extend from the Corrective action to a Change Request and onto a Change Order. At each step, a link back to the item record that spawned it is available for audit trail purposes.

 

-Brian Schanen

PLM 360 Video spotlight - Creating New Items

Hello PLM 360 fans. This week’s video spotlight is the next step in using PLM 360. By now you’ve seen the administrative side, setting up your site, users, workflow. Now I’d like to take you on a tour of creating and using Items created in a workspace. Also discussed is the Main Menu of Categories, Cloning Items, and the Left Search view of any given Workspace.

http://wikihelp.autodesk.com/PLM_360/enu/community/Videos/Creating_New_Items

Please note that these videos will also be posted to the official Autodesk PLM 360 YouTube channel.

Enjoy!

 

-Brian Schanen

PLM 360 Tip of the Week - Picklist Management

Picklists in PLM 360 are global drop downs that provide a variety of benefits including standardizing data entry and easily linking Workspaces to one another. These can be created on-the-fly during field creation in a Workspace OR outside of Workspace setup. Access is administrative only, and is found through the Administration menu.

Once in setup, choose the General tab (as this is a global setting) and click Picklist Manager

Within this area, you have the ability to create a new list. When creating Picklists that are driven from other Workspaces consider prefixing them with a something common − like [WS] List Name − to easily identify which ones come from Workspaces.

The Picklists also have the option to Edit (add rows, modify Descriptions), to Delete, and to perform a Where Used. That is especially useful to leverage before you delete a Picklist. The Where Used query will Display the Workspace where its used, which Tab, and which Field, making this a very useful lookup.

-Brian Schanen