How to Achieve Major and Minor revision on Part in Windhcill 12

[AP_10483126]

Do we need customization for Major and Minor revision or there is an OOTB feature in windchill 12.

[avillanueva]

Just so we are clear, how would you define the difference between major and minor revisions?

[AP_10483126]

Major Revision : When there are major changes and this needs to be sent to the supplier.

Minor Revision : When there are simple changes to perform but the revision doesn't need to be communicated to supplier.

[avillanueva]

My 2 cents would be to not over complicate things. A revision is a revision is a revision. Just to be clear that we are not talking about FFF which should change part number.  I would and do handle this in the change process. I have a type of technical and non-technical change. They are all still revisions but you can work into the process that if its is a non-technical change (minor), it would not trigger those working with a supplier to do anything. 

[jbailey]

This could be handled with Complexity (already part of a change notice). Full track requires going through a Change Request Board on the Change Request, and A Change Implementation Board on the Change Notice process.

[AP_10483126]

This wont work if they want to revise on major and minor right ?

[jbailey]

In applying EIA-649 (the CM Standard we follow)-

Major Change (Class I Change) - "A change with significant impacts, such as impacts to functional and physical interchangeability and supportability of the product"

Minor Change (Class II Change) - "A change that has little or no significant impact"

Major Change Criteria

•  A change that affects specified and approved requirements for product attributes, including safety, reliability, and supportability.
• A change, after the establishment of the product baseline, i.e., the baseline for implementation of the product design, that affects compatibility with interfacing products, including such products as test equipment, support equipment, software, and products furnished by a customer or that affects one or more of the following:
  • Delivered operation or servicing instructions.
  • Required calibration to the extent that product identification should be changed.
  • Interchangeability or substitutability of replaceable products, assemblies, or components.
  • Change to add a previously non-qualified supplier, where supplier selection is specified.
  • User skills or user physical attributes.
  • Operator or maintenance training.
  • Requires retrofit of delivered products; e.g., by product recall, modification kit installation, attrition, replacement during maintenance using modified spares.
  • A change that does not impact the above criteria and would otherwise be classified as minor but does impact cost/price/delivery to customer(s), including incentives and fees, guarantees, warranties, and contracted deliveries or milestones.

Minor Change Criteria
Indicates no impact to the functional, performance and/or interchangeability characteristics of the item and that the change is transparent to the Acquirer requiring no action on the Acquirer’s part.

Administrative Change Criteria
Indicates a basic documentation correction that has no impact on the delivered item and is transparent to the Acquirer (fixing spelling errors, grammar corrections, updating an address, etc.).

PTC Would have this covered with their Full Track, Fast Track and Basic Change Complexities.

[HelesicPetr]

@jbailey 

really nice explanation.

PetrH

[AP_10483126]

How will you manage the revision. If the user wants to do a revise of minor revision or a Major revision and how will you update those revision?

[avillanueva]

I would strongly avoid complex series like A1, A2, B1, B2, B3, C1, etc, where A would be major and number minor.  Just stick to straight letters and let the Change Notice capture that. All that changes is the amount of review  and any workflow routes.

[AP_10483126]

Its the requirement for the customer as their current process they have the major and minor revision. If they want to migrate to Windchill and use the same way of working . Is there any OOTB solution for this or this needs to be customized?

[jbailey]

I would recommend that if you are doing consulting and implementing Windchill for a "customer" that you might actually want to know/understand Windchill functionality. As I described earlier, OOTB Windchill allows you to designate a change as Full Track (Major/Class 1), Fast Track (Minor/Class 2), or Basic. If a normal end user is modifying objects via change notice, objects will need to be revised through a change notice task.

[AP_10483126]

Fastrack and fulltrack is based on the complexity and CRB board right ? How this will help to get the user to revise on Major and Minor revisions? I would like to understand the revision with fulltrack and fasttrack?

[jbailey]

Typically, changes that meet a specific threshold (cost, schedule, complexity, risk etc) would be categorized as a "Major" Change and would go through a review board for approval. This could happen for both a Change Request and a Change Notice. In Windchill, a Full Track change includes a Review task in both CR/CN to account for recording an approval authority vote on a change request or a change notice plan of work.

[AP_10483126]

Yeah i think this solution wont help with different revisions to be managed.

[HelesicPetr]

Hi @AP_10483126 

What is your requirement? Windchill can cover many things but not OOTB. 

Do you need to see the min/maj change in the revision ? what is minor and major change? why it is so important for you?

Do not try to bend Windchill to work as old systems. It is really pain. And many things are not possible to achieve(or needs years of sw. development). 

You can solve minor major by workflow as others describes. Fast/Full track you can change the words to minor/major and set the workflow as you need.

End user (engineer) needs to do the revision in all situations for the change. 

Also there can be another settings that major change goes throw change workflow, minor change goes throw promotion request workflow and so on. 

There can be many ways how to get the required stage. 

Just open your mind to accept different solutions

PetrH

[AP_10483126]

Always Open to the solutions if it meets the requirement. so basically the OOTB is not possible in Windchill is what i understand. In case we need to get a Major and Minor revision on revise for the business users we would need to customize the entire revise functionality in that case? Probably give it as a drop down on revise page for a minor and manjor revision.

[jbailey]

As previously posted, it depends on the use case. 

Is the expectation that the revision letter wouldn't change with a minor change?

[AP_10483126]

Revision letter will have to change with Major and Minor . Ex: XX.1 , XX.2 , XX.3 , XX.4 are minor revision on revise. AA.XX , AB.XX , AC.XX are Major revision.

[jbailey]

So the number after the dot is just an iteration... that gets incremented every time the data is checked back in and the letter wont change. That being said, the person doing the work would have to have full control of the object to check in a released (or any other "locked" state)... Which I wouldn't suggest.

[AP_10483126]

No i would say AA-01.01 otherwise. Just to communicate the iteration is after the dot

[avillanueva]

I restate my strong objection against doing this. Trying to control major/minor by the revision scheme will fail and runs counter to best practices.

[AP_10483126]

I agree with you but the customer would like to have it like this. So i would like to understand this can be done through customization only right ?

[HelesicPetr]

Hi @AP_10483126 

Check this help page State-based Scheme

You can specify own revision schema and it can be as your customer wishes but the xml needs to contain all values

AA-ZZ x 00-99 it can be long StateBasedVersioning.xml

PetrH

[AP_10483126]

Yes this would be for the revision. Question is for major and minor revision we need to customize right ?

[HelesicPetr · Accepted solution]

Hi @AP_10483126 

Yes, you need a customization. U would recommend you to convince customer to go different way. 

PetrH

[AP_10483126]

Thank you for confirming. Yes sure will do the best 🙂

[jlecoz]

Is your customer working with Parts and Doc only, or are they using CAD models?

Any customization you would build should work also with the CAD integration. For example Creo provides access to the revise action and it takes automatically the next rev.

Taking care of all the corner cases can be very complex.

[RaviM]

We had done this for a customer by implementing the revision schema A, A1, A2, A3.. , B, B1, B2, B3, C, C1, C2... etc. with 1,2,3 etc. being the minor changes and A to B to C becoming major revisions. Setting the preference to allow manual selection of Revision allowed them to jump from minor rev to major when required.

It worked as expected but then the customer had to rollback to the OOTB schema A, B, C etc, since the ERP system did not accept the longer revision format. There were also minor issues such as sort order etc.