Steve,
What in particular are you looking for? A general understanding of the tools and how to use them? Or more of a comprehensive, detailed instruction and how you can apply it to your needs?
We'd be happy to help you out - feel free to send me an e-mail directly if you are interested.
Can you provide the business case for adjusting priority on workflow tasks?
Bob,
I am looking to get a much better understanding of workflows in change management. I have an eLearning license available to me through my company but it doesn't seem to go into too much real detail. I was just wondering if that class has a higher degree of detail.
Having not taken this specific course but reading the description, to me it seems this course will definitely give you more detail than, say, the Business/System Administration courses regarding how to actually use the workflow administrator and hook workflows in to object types. At only 16 hours though, I highly doubt it will do much help towards showing how to accomplish actual, practical use-case scenarios. It will likely just run you through some of the common OOTB workflows and show you how to place the necessary components in with some generic best practices to keep yourself from shooting yourself in the foot, but not so much on forethought on those workflows or cool things you can do with them, like hooking them into reports, for example. Those kinds of things would come from people experienced in building specific workflows to meet specific client needs in actual production systems.
In other words, definitely good for "how to do it", but may fall short on "the best way to do it".
Steve,
It sounds like you're looking to understand the process behind the Change Management workflows, and in my experience none of the available training is going to help much with this (I think I've taken most if not all of it). Windchill Change Management is, for the most part based on the CMII methodology although after having gone through all of the CMII training and getting CMII certified I do see there are some missing pieces. For the most part the constructs are the same... Problem Report, Change Request and Change Notice for example and the OOTB role names are slightly different (WC Change Administrator X = Change Specialist X). I have yet to figure out what Change Admin III really does in a workflow that is more automated and does not require the maintenance of logs or manually "Releasing".
You can take the first 4 or 5 CMII courses online from The Institute of Configuration Management https://icmhq.com/, or in the alternative, I am coin operated and you can "feed the meter" for as much or as little mentoring/informal knowledge transfer as you like. Please feel free to contact me directly if interested.
I will say, and this is strictly my opinion that it's worth having a look at CMII before developing your own workflows or automating your current ones. For companies with informal or non-existent processes there is an opportunity to mature by adoption of a methodology that embodies best practices and can be applied in virtually any industry. For companies that are transitioning to PLM it's an opportunity to take a huge step towards improvement and avoid the common pitfall of automating bad process.
I almost always gravitate toward attempting to use diagrams (creatively, and iteratively) for things like this. For change management especially there are lots of things to address, interconnected. The PTC diagrams are extensive but so far haven't "gelled" the understanding for me.
For change management, have to lay out (at least):
- the data (e.g. drawing, related models, possibly WTParts at Rev B (Affected Objects, at Released state)
- the data ((e.g. drawing, related models, possibly WTParts at Rev C (Resulting Objects, first at In Work state, then later at Released state)
- each of the change objects (Request, Notice, Task) and their states, and relationships to affected and resulting
- each of the change object workflow processes, and where they effect state changes to the change object and data
- each of the change object team instances, their Roles and principals
- more but you get the idea
I've moved toward always laying out vs. time what is happening to the product data (e.g. Rev B Released >> Rev C In Work, then Released)
Then and only then, laying the change object states next these
Then and only then, laying out the change object workflow processes
Keir,
I want to be able to create my own workflows. I understand the basics. We have a partner company that created our workflows and I have modified them slightly...very slightly.
I was looking to get a deeper understanding of them and was looking to see what's out there for training.
I will probably just end up contracting with our partner for the training.
In RELEX-7.7 there was a way to list Lambda and Tau with each Basic Event in a print of an FTA description. How does one do that in WC-10.1 ?? Thank you for your help.
I can't speak to Windchill 8, but in 9.1 there is a "switch" that can be enabled to allow deleted users to show up with (Deleted) after their names. Once this is turned on they can be searched for using the advanced search page.
If you have a user listed two times (or more) and one of them has "(Deleted)" after their name, then at some point in the past that user was manually deleted from Windchill and then at later was either manually recreated or automatically recreated (possibly from Active Directory integration.) Unfortunately there is no way to merge the separate profiles.
While an administrator can cancel a check out, there is no way for an administrator to check in work for a user unless they physically log in as that user. Since this user has already been deleted, you would need to go into the database, unmark the user as deleted, create a new LDAP account, reconnect the (now disconnected user) to this new account, then log in as them. Only then would you be able to check in anything they have checked out.
https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS17742
PTC offers a web based Workflow Administration course that goes beyond eLearning and Business Admin. I have taken it and found it beneficial, but to get real traction you'll want to learn some Java for use in Expression and Synchronization Robots... as well as download the Windchill JavaDoc and explore it.
Sorry, I haven't replied earlier, I was having login issues. The initiators of workflows want to put a priority on their workflows (low, medium, high) so that users will be able to determine which workflows to accept first. Currently, the only priority option is "high". Consequently, all workflows are listed with the same priority. Can the priority be set by the initiator? If so, how?
Well according to PTC TS case CS60208, this can only be accomplished with a workflow manually kicked off, and I am betting that most if not all of your workflow tasks are getting kicked off by object creation (the typical method, as in for Change Objects, Promotion Requests, etc).
Here's somewhat of a "low-brow" solution:
That's my 2 cents.
Another approach that can be used focuses on the PBO (e.g change request) rather than on the workflow processes or tasks:
A) Add an "urgency" type attribute on all PBO's that can be associated to workflows, and allow it to be set by users as needed at all states
B) Develop and distribute a query builder report to find tasks <> workflow processes <> currently-assigned users <> PBO's, that can be sorted / filtered by urgency*
* Even better if you run this report from a macro in Excel
Users then need to:
- Use the report before looking at their tasks table
- Filter the report by themselves (or group lead filter by their users)
When I left Alcon we had ~ 760 Tasks / day being completed, and this became a relatively big deal - the report can be very helpful. Also turned into some negotiation between leads for setting the urgency attribute values of various PBO's.
Is this the class you are talking about? It's from the link I originally provided. Or is it something else?
That is what we did. We created an attribute called Request Priority.
Thanks for all the suggestions everyone. I'll let you know which we decided to go with.
Manipulating domain policies can be a lot of 'fun'. Mike's solution is great as long as the Windchill system follows domain policy best practices. But there is a good chance these recommendations won't work. It just depends on the nuances of your current business configuration.
Unfortunately there are many ways to accidentally limit site admin's permissions while trying to limit access to everyone else. So always configure and validate in a test environment first.
FYI: In case you discover your site admin suddenly has read-only permissions to the system, there is a Windchill property that will bypass/disable all access controls (CS20793).
That's the one... It covers workflows, but not Change Management Objects (Problem Report/Change Request/Change Notice/Change Task) or the process behind Change Management. It does go over all of the constructs in the Workflow Administration Utility such as Activity Nodes, Robots and Logical Nodes (AND/OR/etc). A lot of it I had figured out through trial and error and help files but I did come away having learned some new things and I found it valuable overall.
Again, understanding workflows and understanding the CMII Change Management objects/process are different animals. Understanding how they relate in Windchill another still.
Anyone have the simple solution to this error? I am running PSI as root and have full rights to the staging directory. As soon as I click on begin install, I get the error about javasdk can't continue and it stops right there. The interesting thing is that I installed Windchill 11 on another clone of the server without getting this error. From what I read, it could be a rights issue somewhere, but I am running this as root. Anyone have any ideas on what to look for? Thanks in advance!