Overview

Business information and business objects become more mature throughout the product development cycle. During this cycle, circumstances change, such as who can access data, what processes are related, and where an object can mature to next. Life cycles define the way in which these business objects mature, providing a model for a product’s commercialization process.

A Windchill user in the life cycle administrator role can create a variety of life cycles. These life cycles define the states and transitions associated with various business objects and the available transitions between those states.

The Life Cycle Model

A life cycle is an automated, graphical model, employing phases and gates, used to manage business objects as they progress from conceptualization through obsolescence.

While an object is in a specific life cycle phase, certain business rules apply, such as access control rules or a specific workflow defined for that phase.

When created, an object modeled to be life cycle-managed enters a life cycle phase, where it is assigned an initial state, and is then associated with the initial phase of its life cycle.

Windchill Solutions

Object initialization rules are used to designate to which life cycle an object type is assigned when a user creates a new object of that type. Workflows associated with an object manage the maturing processes from state to state through workflow activity templates. When new versions of an object are created through the Revise action, the team and the life cycle is assigned to the object following the same rules as when the object was created, and the life cycle state is set to the first state of the life cycle.

Depending on several business environment considerations (impact of change, development team, maturity of object, type of object, and so forth), it may be important to tailor the life cycle to include certain business operations and to define how these operations are executed. Transition rules tailor how Change Management, Revise, Promotion, and Set State operations should behave and which workflow processes you should use to manage these processes.

Life Cycle States

The sophistication of business processes to manage an object depends upon the maturity of the object. State is an enterprise object, and its meaning is applied regardless of the life cycle by which a given object was processed. For example, if an access control rule applies to a Requirements object in the Under Review state,