Visibility of Work In Progress BOMs

Hi All,

Possibly more of a business process question rather than a technical one, but hopefully you can shed some light on this…

I’m currently working on a task to allow certain users to view work in progress BOMs (WTParts), effectivity giving them a preview of unreleased data to allow certain activities such as preliminary BOM costing to take place. The problem, however, is that a work in progress data is in a constant state of flux, and is regularly incomplete (e.g., components may be missing because a user is in the middle of making changes).

So on to my question…

• Do you allow anyone (beyond the authors that are modifying the BOM) to see unreleased BOM versions?
• If so, how do you ensure the data they are looking at is somewhat accurate/complete?

A couple of ideas I have had on the latter question:

• Authors could create baselines at regular intervals to provide a snapshot of a point when the BOM was accurate/complete
• Authors could record a date/time when the BOM was accurate/complete, we could develop a report or configuration filter to show this data (basically an As Matured report that allows for any state)
• We provide some kind of state or attribute to allow authors to flag specific versions as ‘accurate’, and then develop a report or configuration filter to show this

Any input appreciated, even if it’s that you outright only allow visibility of released data!

Thanks