How to reconstruct a Change History?

[HugoHermans]

How to reconstructthe change history of an article? Or, how to capture product changes to enable reconstructing change history?

Suppose, a customer has a 7-years old machine and asks for a replacement. Starting from his 'historical' components, there may be several alternative paths to solve his problem. Is Windchill Change Management capable of giving us support to this survey?

I want to store away in Windchill the replacement scenario's developed during a change process, enabling me to reconstruct those paths afterwards. An old part is replaced by a new one, or by several new ones, with or without conditions. Sometimes, a replacement of an old part by a new one involves other replacements as well. Over time, this can lead to several scenario's, with each scenario consisting of several hubs.

Of course, product changes can be captured by a raise of the revision as well, but only for 100% backward compatibility in all the BOMs where the product is member of. Unfortunatly, most of our changes do not meet this requirement.

As far as I read in the Windchill help, 'Replacement Parts' (substitutes and alternates) are not meant to cover this issue, or are they? How does this integrate with change management?

Thanks in Advance, Hugo.

<< ProE WF5 - PDMLink 10.1 M040>>

[pwilliams-3]

Hugo,
Are you asking if Windchill can produce a BOM of a part with it's released dependents at a specific point in history? For example Assembly1 has released revisions A, B, C spanning several years. You want to know the BOM when revision A was released? If you had this information could you support your use case of reconstructing the change history?

BTW, Windchill cannot do this however PTC is working on an "As Matured" config spec which will do just that. Otherwise Steelcase has solved this with a Cognos report.

Patrick Williams | Engineering Systems | c: 616.947.2110
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[HugoHermans]

Hello Brian and Patrick,

Thanks for your reply. In Windchill, we have the revision history on articles (and CADdocuments). But since backward compatibility is a requirement for revising an article, a lot of changes are done by creating new articles, and replacing the old article in the BOM by a new one. I was brainstorming to some 'references' and 'referenced by' concept between WTParts, as for WTDocuments, but maybe analyzing BOMs should do the job as well.

I think I have to build a use case ...

Regards, Hugo.

[rhegde]

Hermans,

Brian has already explained the concept of baselines to track machine
snapshot at a given time. I am trying to address how you can track
replacements in Windchill.

*Alternate*:

A part that may be used in place of the specified part in ANY assembly.

*Substitute*:

A part that may be used in place of the specified part in A SPECIFIC
assembly.

*Supersession* (End Of Lifecycle - Replacement):

The specified part has reached end of lifecycle due to certain reason (cost
or compliance etc). This has to be replaced in all new assemblies


Alternates and substitutes cover the scenarios where replacement is
required in assembly. However, by definition, they do not necessarily
consider end of lifecycle scenario (DO NOT use specified part scenario).

Windchill currently supports alternates and substitutes. As per my
knowledge, PTC wanted to include Supersession functionality in 10.2 (?).
PTC needs to confirm if it will be available in a future release (or it is
already available in 10.2).

*Note*:

- The word "Supersession" has been used differently at different companies.

- On Windchill 10.X, "Configurable Link"s can be used to quickly/easily
implement this solution. Take a look at the screenshot below.

So, if a customer has 7 year old machine (where the several parts of the
machine may have been replaced), you can quickly go through Supersession
table and find out new parts that are currently used.

[image: Inline image 1]

- You may also want to explore Servigistics. Servigistics is a "Service
Management Solution". As per my knowledge, It provides two relation types

Alternate Relation Types

Replace Relation Types


--
Rochan Hegde
Productspace Solutions Inc.