We are starting to create configurable products and would like to handle the whole chain from EBOM to MBOM to Process Plan in Windchill before sending the MBOM and Process Plan to our ERP.
Is here anyone who has implemented some form of automation for creating Process Plans for configurable products?
It seems that you can filter the Process Plan with a Variant Specification, but for some reason I cannot use the same VarSpec that was used in generating the EBOM and MBOM variants. I need to create a new Variant Specification inside the Process Plan Structure browser to get some different type of Variant Specification that can be used to filter the Process Plan.
Here are the different Variant Specification types as described in the Windchill Help Center:
The top most type is created when you configure a configurable product and the second one is created when you create a new Variant Specification from Process Plan Structure browser.
Also just filtering the Process Plan is not enough for our needs because we are planning to send the Process Plan to ERP through ERP Connector and filtering does not create a new, unique object that could be sent to ERP.
So I have a few questions regarding this topic:
1. What kind of options is there for creating Process Plan variants from a 150% Process Plan with Windchill 12.0.2.6?
2. Windchill 13.0.2.0 introduces the ability to actually generate variant Process Plans, which sounds great. But does it actually work as intended? Does anyone have any experiences with that function yet?
3. Can we somehow utilize the Variant Specification filter in Process Plan to send the filtered Process Plan to ERP?
4. If we can, how can we create those "other" kind of Variant Specifications other than through the Process Plan Structure browser? And how can I then use that Variant Specification to generate a new product variant from the 150% EBOM/MBOM?
5. How about Work Instructions? Can we create an overloaded Work Instruction and then use the Variant Specifications to create different variants of them?
