Advanced Workflow - User Essentials

Workflow – Group Review Workflow States

Optionally, the administrator can configure some workflow STATES to be special states called GROUP REVIEW workflow STATES. GROUP REVIEW STATES are especially helpful if the organization has regularly scheduled times that a team of decision makers meet to go through the open/active EC records together (as a group they review and discuss the EC records). During these scheduled meetings, a decision maker from each required department (Engineering, Manufacturing, Quality Control, Purchasing, etc.) would be present to review the open/active EC records as a group. To accomplish this, the module has a method for each of the meeting’s present decision makers to “sign-in” and to “sign-out” of the review meeting as needed. In other words, while a single user is physically logged into the workstation that is projecting (for the decision makers to share), each of the present decision makers can establish a virtual login within its MechWorks PDM session that is being used for the GROUP REVIEW . During the meeting, a single approve/reject action against an EC record’s GROUP REVIEW STATE is applied for each of the decision makers that are currently “signed-in”. This method ensures that the workflow history can properly capture that each decision maker approved/rejected the EC record without having to have serial/sequential workflow STATES for each department (hopefully eliminating overall delays in the defined workflow PROCESS).

The administrator can declare any existing workflow STATE a GROUP REVIEW workflow STATE by configuring it to require two or more decision makers from two or more department groups. For example:

Change Request Group Review

Engineering Dept.

Manufacturing Dept.

Quality Control Dept.

Purchasing Dept.

Charlie

Sally

Snoopy

Marcie

Lucy

Linus

Patty

Pig Pen

Woodstock

The noted GROUP REVIEW STATE can then be added to a workflow PROCESS:

40136 Bologna Italy

www.mechworks.com

126