Supersede, what's the point?

[jroegner]

The subject was meant to catch your attention as this is a very important function.  But today it seems like a fairly useless function.  Aside from not being able to navigate within in it (no links) which was already submitted separately, the only obvious awareness to the supersede is if you are on the part and see the icon or by chance are in the correct tab.

1. With supersede, a user should be able to do replace like substitutes or alternatives.  Especially as when something is superseded, that means it is being replaced by something else. 
2. There should be a function to make it clear when viewing a BOM structure that the superseded part is no longer to be used (maybe highlight in red).  Along with this, there should be a preference to prevent checkin of a BOM if a part has been superseded.  We don't want people doing a save as of an old BOM and carrying over parts that can't be used.
3. There needs be a function that can output the "superseded by" in the XML of the distribution target like substitutes so our ERP can be flagged accordingly.  (We'd obsolete the part in the process)  Back to the subject, what is the point if we can't convey it in our ERP system where parts are ordered from.

[GregoryPERASSO]

Definitively agry for all the points.

I will add also :

- abilty to setup the system to create automatically the "superseded" link when use the "replace" action in the BOM and searching or creating a new part

- use this superseded link in BOM comparator or even in ESI XML delta behaviour to flag what has changed  (not obly the internal CompID)

[JeffZemsky]

1) A user can replace with new or existing (one at a time) and use mass change replace functionality right in the context of Windchill.  A video can be seen here

Executing the Change Process PTC Live 2015

We would certainly like to continue to streamline this in the future.  Replacements are usually a different use case than a Supersede though.  One might use a Replacement, but that has not been the common case.

2) You can display the Supersede glyph in structures and its already shown on the Part info page header.  For Accessibility rules one cannot use color alone as an indicator.

3) You can create an Alias attribute that will show what the supereded (superseding - depending upon which way you;d like to show) that you can see in Structure, HTML BOM reports, etc. Here is an example mapping

masterReference^wt.part.WTPartMaster~superseded@wt.supersede.SupersedeLink~superseding^wt.part.WTPar...

[jroegner]

Thanks Jeff.  That does help.  However it is not intuitive and more importantly not OOTB.

There are two sides to this concern.  Windchill and ERP.  Obviously PTC can't control ERP.  However at a minimum there should be a Distribution Target option. Today I can map the attribute, edit the XML files and make it work but it is just not OOTB clear.  Nor do I feel I should need to create an attribute for data that is there but not readily accessible.  Especially because ERP is used for ordering and if someone wants to order an old part the system need to know what replaces it.  Some may not want this data so we need one more toggle to the DT.

[Pekholm]

I agree that the tool available for replace a part need to support the complete process, including mass replace and publish to ERP. As is, the process is not consistent and requires different tools to be executed.