Vendors/Suppliers in Windchill

[ChrisCollinson]

Hi All

As many of you may, we have various vendors who need access to our drawings and models as they make compnents for us. We want to allow them access into Windchill. We want to be able to restrict what data they can access as Vendor A may make Assy A but not Assy B

How do you guys segregate the vendors/data so that only certain vendors can see certain objects. We have all our CAD data in libraries within Windchill.

Have thought about using ProjectLink but how do you get the projects areas updated if a drawing is modified and re-released.

Have also thought about Security Labels but hear that is a nightmare to set up

If you can recommend/Share/Advise on good methods that you use, please do

Thanks all, Happy Friday

Chris

[AL_ANDERSON]

I do not know a lot about security labels, but based on the little I know,
I would suspect that you have some external entity with whom you want
controlled collaboration regarding PDMLink objects stored across multiple
PDMLink contexts, then using a project link project is better than
anything else.

As far as updating the shared objects, I have always wondered why project
link doesn't have a share option that will auto-update to the latest
revision or stay at a current revision, depending on the options selected.
May Windchill 10 has better functionality there. However, if you are in
a version of Windchill in which sharing to projects is version-specific,
then you can automate any updates of new revisions by using a workflow in
the released (or some other) state of the lifecycle template to replace
any earlier revisions shared to projects with the later document revision.
You might even use some drawing attributes to assist in knowing what to
do as far as sharing goes.

I suppose that if you don't like workflow for some reason (i.e. worried
about queue failures, or whatever), then you could write a custom event
listener that listens for a drawing state change event, and then performs
whatever logic and tasks you need to automate.

Al Anderson





Chris Collinson <->
07/22/2011 05:31 AM
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[solutions] - Vendors/Suppliers in Windchill




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Hi All
As many of you may, we have various vendors who need access to our
drawings and models as they make compnents for us. We want to allow them
access into Windchill. We want to be able to restrict what data they can
access as Vendor A may make Assy A but not Assy B
How do you guys segregate the vendors/data so that only certain vendors
can see certain objects. We have all our CAD data in libraries within
Windchill.
Have thought about using ProjectLink but how do you get the projects areas
updated if a drawing is modified and re-released.
Have also thought about Security Labels but hear that is a nightmare to
set up
If you can recommend/Share/Advise on good methods that you use, please do
Thanks all, Happy Friday
Chris

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[cc-2]

Hello

ProjectLink would also be my prefered choice. As far as ensuring the latest released version is in the project, there are different ways

I supposed the previous released revision will be set to obsolete. Therefore it will also be obsolete in the project and your vendor will inform you that he cannot download the file or cannot find it therefore the project manager will manually update the project.

Project Update does not work for WTdocument grrrrrr.....

As said by Al, when you release a new version whoever is the approver should check the share status of the Object and request/do the project update.

The above is a manual step but better than nothing 🙂

PS: It would have been nice to have a Out of date Status as per the Workspace.

[flamy]

I am not sure to understand your comment "Project Update does not work for WTdocument grrrrrr....."

When you share a document to a project, the share "floats" on that revision: any new iterations of the document in the source context are automatically reflected in the shares. Therefore, the shared document is never out of date and, therefore, update project is never needed (for documents).
Like other objects, the share is restricted to the revision: if you revise a shared document, the new revision of the document is not automatically shared -- you must share it explicitly (either in addition to or instead of the previous revision). This is the case for other object types as well.

~ Francois

François LAMY <">mailto:-> | VP Product Management - Windchill Products Group | PTC

[DanGlenn]

In Reply to Francois Lamy:

"...Therefore, the shared document is never out of date and, therefore, update project is never needed (for documents). "
"Like other objects, the share is restricted to the revision: ..."

I know this is an old discussion but I wanted to clarify this becasue for us, this is a critical point.

To our method of configuration management, the two statements above are contradictory. The document is out of date the moment a new revision is available. ProjectLink should be able to handle both use cases out of the box without workflow customizations. We would like to be able to chose whether the share is revision specific or document specific as there is a clear use case for both. At Solar, the lack of an easy way to accomodate our use case is a big dissatisfier among our users and keeps Projectlink from wider adoption (Typical customer: "It doesn't do latest revision? I've got to do what to keep it up to date? What good is that?") Other products like Sharepoint and IBM Connections are taking over this space and it become yet another disconnect in our PTC PLM landscape.

Dan Glenn

Solar Turbines Incorporated

[mdebower]

I agree with Dan. This behavior has never made any sense to me.

In fact I would rather have ProjectLink always stay up to date with the latest version and the users have to do a Save As to a project specific copy if they want a static version.

-marc
CAD / PLM Systems Manager

[ahamblett]

I realize this is an old thread but does anyone have an update to your use cases?

I'd be curious to hear any pros/cons you may have run into using Project Link.

Also, how are you handling outside data if you do NOT use Project link? 

In particular, CAD (.stp) files? Does anyone run those through a workflow before propagating into a Product Assembly (.asm)?

Are you applying a Release State to those particular objects and if so, how? Manually? Workflow?

Or by virtue of their import location [into Windchill] is access restricted somehow, to prevent modification, etc.?

Thanks in advance!

-Adam

Configuration & Data Manager

OrbitalATK