•Access permissions for the role players associated with each life cycle phase.

•Workflow processes to be associated with each phase and gate.

•Transitions to be defined from the current (selected) state to any defined state within the life cycle template.

Note

An advanced life cycle is denoted by in the Life Cycle Template Administration utility.

The advanced life cycle type provides the ability for a separate team to be assigned for instances of this object type and to include workflow process definitions within the life cycle states to manage the maturing of the object type. Use this type for managing objects that require company-specific business processes, special access control requirements, or additional flexibility in managing these types of objects.

Managing Life Cycle Processes

In Windchill, the life cycle is the core capability to manage an object's maturity (referred to as a life cycle state) as well as access control policies to manage or view the object for a set of roles in the system. Each object type in a Windchill system can have unique sets of life cycle states and access control policies. Object initiation rules are used to designate which life cycle an object is assigned when a user creates a new object of that type. Workflows can be used to manage the maturing processes from state to state through workflow activity templates. By default, when new versions of an object are created through the Revise action, the life cycle state is set to the first state of the life cycle. A life cycle administrator can specify the target state of the Revise action.

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.

For example, a development team in the automotive division of a company can have different review processes for releasing a design specification than the industrial products division. The automotive division may require a prototype to be created for a new product before the first production versions of the product are released. Formal change processes are required to update these prototype designs.

After a part has been initially released to production, new versions of the design are designated as Production Change, and they must undergo a formal change process.

The following figure is an example of the variety of business processes that can be used with a Windchill system to mature different types of product development deliverables. The development team processes for the review and release of a design specification can differ from those required for the release of a new configuration of the product.

The next figure illustrates a case when a combination of the business processes is required for some product development deliverable objects, such as parts, as they move from a concept, through prototyping, and into production.

Windchill PDMLink supports the following business processes that you can use to manage the life cycle of a part, document, or CAD document. You can use transition rules to control when in the life cycle this operation is available. For example:

•Set State - Enables you to informally set the life cycle state of an object.

•Promote - Enables you to set the state of one or more objects to a new life cycle state as part of a review process.

•Change - Enables you to execute a change order for a product development object.

•Revise - Enables you to create a new version of the object.

For more information on transition rules, see Transition Rules on page 314

Accessing the Life Cycle Template

Administration Utility

Life cycle templates are created and managed from the Life Cycle Template Administration utility. You can access the utility by clicking the Life Cycle Template Administration link on the Utilities page available from Site ,

Organizations , Products , or Libraries .