Granting Suppliers Access to Parts they Supply

[dwilliams]

We would like to grant our suppliers read access to PDMLink and grant them access only to those parts they supply. We would also like them to see the describing documentation associated with these parts. What's the best approach you have found to handle this?

Thanks in advance for your advice,
Dax Williams
Business Administrator, Windchill
Lifetime Products, Inc.
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[mdebower]

If you have ProjectLink, you could create a Project for each supplier, and share all the parts they supply to that project. This ensures that they can't modify the shared data and send it back into PDM. It also is another layer of protection from letting them accidently have access to the rest of your PDM system.

Additionally you can collaborate with them on proposed changes and save other types of documents in the Project related to their parts. Quotes for example.

-marc

In Reply to Dax Williams:

We would like to grant our suppliers read access to PDMLink and grant them access only to those parts they supply. We would also like them to see the describing documentation associated with these parts. What's the best approach you have found to handle this?

Thanks in advance for your advice,
Dax Williams
Business Administrator, Windchill
Lifetime Products, Inc.
-<mailto:->

[Lifetime_Logo_BlkWhite_Sans_email sig]

[MikeLockwood]

We had some design work done outside last year (Change Tasks) and had to deal with this. We initially set up a project as stated below. The problems started for shared items that are extensive. Example - An assembly has a screw in it which is a 200 item family table. For the assy to be available, the screw has to be -which means the family table needs to be. Similar for drawing formats. For the drawing to come up, they need Read for the .frm files. We invested quite a lot of hours in trying to get a process to work with PJL but we could never get it even close to working with real data.
We ended up moving all data to be changed to a special Library (rather than a project to avoid having multiples of everything) for the work, then moving back afterward. Lots of overhead for sure. This was ok for simple piece parts with no top-down design but got hopelessly confused when any advanced Pro/E functionality was involved.

We finally sort of threw in the towel on the whole effort and now have all work done in-house by contractors, but we're still interested in a good solution.

No real conclusions here except that the very simplistic solution offered by PTC to use PJL for this purpose hasn't really been proven out with standard Pro/E functionality such as top down design (at least from what we could see documented and from what we tried to do).

Interested in learning from others on this...

[ddemay]

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

[dwilliams]

We started looking into using ProjectLink to handle this but we found that on top of the issues mike mentioned, the share is also iteration specific. In order for the supplier to see the latest, the project manager would have to constantly refresh the shared data. The chance for the supplier to get out-of-date data is very possible here. Very interested if others have been able to successfully utilize ProjectLink to share their PDMLink data with suppliers.

Creating a separate library is an option to be considered. The only real issues I see with this option is that it gets us further away from our product based libraries and as mike stated, it could cause a lot of overhead.

Dave,
Thanks for the tip on security labels and agreements. Were still fighting to upgrade to 9.1 thanks to a few broken family table links. I will start investigating the use of these two "miracles" and hopefully they will be the solution we are looking for.

Regards,
Dax

[RussPratt]

While there are many mechanisms that can be used depending on your specific business requirements, it is generally a good starting point to create WTOrg objects for your different suppliers, and insure that supplier users are assigned to the proper organization. This allows you to create access policy rules (as well as use ad hoc rules if needed) that apply to the WTOrganization object, automatically applying to all users associated with an org. This isn't the full solution, but is generally a foundational part of any solution to what you are needing.

Russ