THE PLM STATE

The PLM State: Automating Revisioning Sequences in Agile PLM

revstate-revision automaterEnsuring a reliable and consistent approach to product revisions within Agile PLM can prove to be a daunting and often tedious task. Depending on the complexity of the product development workflow of your organization, you may utilize one revision sequence when the product is in the prototype phase and switch to a different sequence as the product transitions into production. To further muddy the waters, there may be legacy revision numbers and sequences which need to be taken into account when determining the next revision for a product undergoing a design change. In short, maintaining accuracy and consistency across product revisions within Agile PLM can translate to a significant number of hours spent by design engineers and change analysts.

RevState is a revision sequence automation tool which was developed by Zero Wait-State to streamline this process. To configure RevState, you simply define your revision sequences as columns within an Excel spreadsheet which is maintained within Agile PLM as a document attachment. Once you have configured RevState using the Excel spreadsheet, it then uses those sequences to automate setting revisions when adding affected items to an ECO within Agile PLM. For example, if an engineer is modifying a subassembly and adds the relevant parts to an ECO, RevState will use the appropriate sequence from the Excel spreadsheet to automatically set the new revision of each affected item based on its previous revision. This means that you define your revision sequences once and your engineers and change analysts reap the benefits of increased accuracy and time savings many times over by not having to concern themselves with entering new revisions.

Another issue often faced by organizations which have legacy or inconsistent revision schemes is transitioning from those schemes to a new, consistent revision scheme. RevState allows you to include your legacy revision numbers within the Excel spreadsheet to clearly indicate the transition points from the legacy revision numbers to new revision numbers. For example, if you are moving to a zero padded numeric scheme and there are legacy revision numbers within your Agile PLM instance are not zero padded, you can simply include the legacy numbers in the Excel spreadsheet at the appropriate position within the sequence and RevState will do the rest.

RevState also supports manual entry of new revision numbers, and will validate any manually entered numbers to make sure they are indeed contained within the Excel spreadsheet. If a user attempts to enter an invalid revision number, they receive a warning message and the invalid revision number is not saved within Agile.

In closing, RevState enables automation of a time consuming and error prone process and ensures consistency of revisions within Agile PLM. This translates to more time for engineers and change analysts to focus on their core competencies of product design and development, since they can rest assured that product revisions are set correctly within Agile PLM every time.

Watch our "Automate your PLM" webinar to learn more about tools that help enhance your PLM solution.

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