Engineering Change Management is practiced in a myriad ways to suit the needs of an organization and industry. Z PLM provides a flexible approach to Engineering Change Management that organizations can use to support Engineering Change Management process the way it makes business sense.
At the core of Engineering Change Management process are 2 fundamental capabilities of Z PLM
- Revision and release management for parts and related information (files, etc.)
- Workflow management and process-to-process relationships
Z PLM provides an special activity called Release Data that can be used flexibly in Process Management to change the Revision Status of process related data (typically parts, files and in some cases FMEAs, Process Plans and other structured documents) to “Released”. Once “Revision Status” of a data item is set to released and checked in, the next checkout changes the revision to next in sequence of Revision attribute values and sets the Revision status to Pending (shown below in the picture).
The picture below shows the Release Parts activity in the ECO workflow.
Process Management and Engineering Change Management
Integral to Z PLM is one of the most powerful workflow management system available today on the market. PLM analysts can use the workflow designer to set up engineering change workflows that suit organizational and industry needs.
Process-to-process Relationships
Z PLM’s unique and effective workflow management system allows connections and relationships between different processes that result in Engineering change requests and orders. While it is not necessary to have these process relationships to drive Engineering Change Orders, organizations can leverage the capability to initiate change requests as a result of corrective actions, failure reports and improvement requests as shown below.
