Sunday, February 7, 2010

Enovia Engineering Central ECR Creation Enhancment

Enovia Engineering Central implements a Change Management process to manage the release of Parts and and its related specification. There are two type of objects:
  • ECR - Engineering Change Request
  • ECO - Engineering Change Order

ECR is used to tell your team members why you want to make a change and which items are affected. ECO is used to implment an ECR. The concept of the ECR/ECO process is good, but it is not user friendly. The out-of-box features need to tons of clicks to complete the ECR/ECO process and it also makes our engineers feel un-confortable to use the tool and always make mistakes. Keep in mind, product engineer are not computer guru and they focus on how to make a good product instead of focus on how to use the PDM system!


Therefore, it is very necessary to customize the Enovia eMatrix Engineering Central to make a user-friendly ECR/ECO process.


First of all, We need to have a new ECR Creation Form. The ECR Creation Form implements the following features:



  • Fill in the ECR Form (same as the OOTB ECR form)

  • List all affected components.

  • Do a WHERE-USED Report, and automatically find all affected assemblies.

  • Find all possible revisable specifications at the the same time.

  • Allow user to enter the specification number

  • Allow user to create suppporting document at the same time.

  • According to above information, create an ECR and link all affected items to the ECR automatically.

  • List those product lines an engineering working on. Don't list all possible product lines.

Here is the screenshot of the ECR Creation form. The new ECR creation will help product engineer to create and prepare an ECR within one screen and implmented the foundation of change management - when initiating a change, product engineer need to know the impact of the change! All PLM systems in the market today missed this fundamental thought and they throw the ball to the product engineer - "It is your resposiblity to do a where-used report and figure out by youself". I personally completely disagree about this.

















If you need to know about how to implement this or how to query database on the fly, please feel free to contact with me.

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