WPA and Windchill (PDMLink)

[ptc-4455604]

Does anyone have their WPA application linked with their Windchill application? We would like to know about the BOMs that are pulled into WPA from Windchill. When compliance reports are run against a BOM, are there parts that are NEVER expected to have a 1752 file associated with it? Parts such as publications or labels, etc? If so, how do you efficiently evaluate if a missing part's data is truly missing or just not needed? Or do you have something customized in Windchill to prevent these parts from coming with the BOM into WPA?

Thanks!

Laura Quackenbush

[jcholin]

Laura,

Two disclaimers, we are not yet Wincchill<=>WPA linked, and I have not yet successfully demonstrated this on our implementation, BUT I am told things that you do not want to participate in the compliance calculation can be taken out with the XREF (SOURCE_QUALIFICATION_STATUS) and setting it to "NOT TO BE CONSIDERED" instead of "ACTIVE". Check with your PTC tech type.

Best wishes for the holidays,

Jeff

[MarkWilliford]

Laura

To clarify, I believe that you are looking for a way to filter out parts that are not applicable to a compliance regulation from a BOM so that they do not influence the compliance status reporting calculation. Let me see if this example is what you are encountering.

Product A is made up of one physical part (Part1) and some software installed on the part (SoftwarePart1). This BOM structure is managed in Windchill and you have collected material content ( via IPC) data for Part1. However, when running the BOM report in WPA for RoHS you keep getting the product status reported as a failure since SoftwarePart1 has a status of "NO DATA".

The way to resolve this issue in the current WPA application is to use the Set Specification Applicability function to set SoftwarePart1 to be Not Applicable for the RoHS specification. Then any BOM reports that include SoftwarePart1 will not consider that part during the rollup of the RoHS specification. This would be the expected method for handling this situation.

The other way to resolve the issue would be to customize the BOM integration with Windchill to exclude parts of certain types via the integration. However, since there is currently not a documented configuration available for the BOM integration it would require customization.

Hope this helps. Let me know if this is not the situation you are trying to handle.

Mark

[ptc-4455604]

Hi Mark,

Your scenario is correct. However, in order to set a part's specification applicability doesn't it need to exist in WPA? These parts are not in WPA. Unfortunately, our supplier, supplier part and company part relationship is being created from the 1752 files we receive. We are loading virtual BOMs because we are unable to get all the data needed to use the BOM AVL parser. Right now I have a program that strips out the parts we don't want and essentially reduces it down to a flat BOM prior to loading.

I thought I had read in PDMLink documentation that there was a way to create filters on the Windchill side to present the BOM structure based on specific criteria (for instance, ignoring publications, labels and other parts not relevant from a compliance perspective).

thanks,

Laura

[MarkWilliford]

Laura

Yes, to set the applicability for a part it must exist in WPA. So in your scenario where you allowing for the IPC upload process to create your supplier, supplier and supplier parts in WPA and then using the Upload BOM from File process there is not a simple solution. It sounds like what you are doing to pre-process the BOM structure before the upload is the best option you have.

In the WPA Process Adapter for PDMLink, there is the ability to use the BOM Saved Filters feature in Windchill to create a view of the BOM that does not include these types of parts. This use case was not the specific intent of this feature but you may be able to make it work. However, it would require you to create this type of saved filter for every BOM you analyze so it may not be an efficient process. Once you have WPA and Windchill integrated, you will see a Saved Filter drop-down on the BOM Information Indented BOM tab to allow you to use the saved filters.

Mark

[kbraun]

David,

How exactly do you set specification applicabilty? We asked this very question during our meeting in October because we've been managing these kinds of parts manually (Manage Compliance for RoHS = compliant) so they stop appearing on the gap reports but having them with only prequalification status and no data is keeping us from running any BOM substance reports.

Thanks,

Kim

[MarkWilliford]

Kim

The Set Specification Applicability feature is for the Company Part (not for the Supplier Part). So you should see a button on the Company Part Search Results page and an action on the Company Part information page. If you are missing the button on these pages, make sure you have the compliance manager role.

(Note: I noticed that this action in one of my development systems is tied to the GROUP_EC_PRODUCTCOMPLIANCE_MANAGER permissions, so check that you have this permission if you do not see the button.)

Mark