Hold Change Task Until Another Change Task Has Been Resolved

[BrianToussaint]

Since we write so many CN's and some of them have an order that they need to go in, I am being asked how can Windchill stop a certain change task from passing certain stages before a different change task that needs to be resolved first gets finished. These are on different CN's of course. The problem is that we used to a have an in-house CN system that we could fill out and this would catch that.

Let's say that I have CN's 00200, 00210 and 00300. Let's say that 00200 and 00300 need to come before 00210 (yes, they will write one after one that should come before an earlier one). Is there any way for this to be accomplished in Windchill? This all needs to be done in the Change Task.

[MichaelEspinosa]

Hi Brian,

You would have to develop code to do this.

I do not believe you have provide sufficient information for the community to understand the significance of why the order for the release of the CA?

Is this business rule driven, because of the data types and association of “Resulting Objects” within these CA? For example for CAD Models and EBOM, do the children objects need to be released before the next higher assembly?

Please provide additional information if you can on the significance of the associations between these CN’s. Perhaps that might help someone (like me) in the community offer some recommendation…. Thank you.

[BrianToussaint]

Hello Michael,

A little more background. We use the CN process to release new models. We do not use promotion requests. Due to project politics, we do not release the whole machine at once, but break it down to smaller CNs. One for purchase parts, one for changes to existing parts, multiple ones for subassemblies and one for the top level assembly. Then with this latest issue, there is a CN that came about because of pilot that needs to be released before the top level but was written after the top level one. The order is important because MFG takes the ENG BOM and tweaks it into a MFG BOM that then when the CN is resolved it writes an XML file that we then import to our ERP system. Actually it writes an XML file for every CN, but we are not using one of the standard ERP systems and had issues in the beginning, so MFG does manually entry except for the top level BOM.

Thanks!

[SimonLucas]

With wc 10.1 you can set the sequence of change tasks. You have to se the site preference 'change management - sequenced plan execution order' to yes. You then get an option to set a sequence order in the implementation plan of a change notice.

As long as you are using OTB change notice workflow should work just fine. If you have a customised change notice workflow then you will need to modify to use code from the OOTB workflow.

To sequence change notices then you would need to write some form of customisation.

Could it all be handled with a single change notice and use the change task sequencing to handle what you require?

[BrianToussaint]

Hello Simon,

If the change tasks have to be all in the same CN, then no we cannot use the change task sequencing to handle my request. The problem is that we require our change task number to equal our change notice number. We cannot have multipe change tasks in one change notice. Our users cannot handle a different number for a change task than what the change notice number is. We had one user that decided to see what would happen and it caused a lot of grief. We had to stop CN creation for a couple of days while PTC helped me reseed my table. Then we had to cancel all the CNs that had out of sequence numbers and the users had to recreate them.

Thanks for the insight though. I doubt that I'm going to do some form of customisation, so we will have to figure out how the group that this affects will handle it.