Planning and building automated item checks

00:08

In this video, let's discuss the sorts of things you may wish to include in your workflow and lay out an example workflow here.

00:16

This will provide the foundation for how we build the workflow in Upchain later on.

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What does it mean to be released?

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We're not talking about released in the Upchain sense, but released at your organization.

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Before you can start to build a workflow in Upchain,

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you need to consider what your desired business process is and what each step of that process looks like.

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Ask yourself these questions.

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What does it mean for an item to be released at your organization?

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What sorts of things must be true for an item to be considered finished?

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What should happen if items do not meet certain criteria?

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Should the workflow end or give the user a chance to fix them before proceeding?

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How many people are involved in the review process?

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Who will have the final sign off?

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These are some of the questions to help you get started in thinking about your desired business process.

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At our example company, here is a possible process that might be followed to release items.

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In addition to ensuring the designs are correct,

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the designer must confirm that all manufactured parts have all necessary information filled in, including a name, description, and material.

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The designer must confirm that all off-the-shelf parts have all necessary information filled in,

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including a name, description, manufacturer, and the manufacturer's catalog number.

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The designer must ensure that all manufactured parts and assemblies have an up-to-date 2D drawing associated with it,

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complete with all necessary views, dimensions, bill of materials, title blocks, and revision blocks.

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The designer must ensure that all assemblies have been rebuilt and updated with the latest parts and subassemblies,

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and they have gathered the necessary weight, density, and simulation results.

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The assembly is then passed to the lead designers assigned to the project or at least one person must review and sign off on the data.

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The assembly is then passed to the manufacturing team to review, and at least 75% of them must approve and sign off on it.

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The assembly is then finally passed to the project manager to review and provide the final approval and sign off.

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If anyone identifies issues in the data, it is sent back to the designer to fix the data before the review process starts again.

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These acceptance or rejections must be properly documented for future audit purposes and lessons learned sessions.

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Here is the same process mapped out in a flow diagram.

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Manufactured items are checked for their correct information, off the shelf items are checked for their correct information.

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Drawings are checked to make sure they are present for assemblies and manufactured items.

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Assemblies and drawings are checked so that they are up to date with the latest model information,

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and then the review process begins, starting with the lead, lead mechanical designers, the manufacturing team, and finally, the project manager.

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If any reviewer identifies issues, the data is sent back to the designer to fix it and the review process starts again.

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So, you can choose any method you wish to map out your desired process as long as it is clear and addresses any possible outcomes at each step.

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In the above example, this process might be quite cumbersome and could span several days depending on how much data there is to sift through.

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There would be a lot of time spent ensuring the data was not only present, but also valid.

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Upchain can help with a lot of this process by ensuring this exact same process is followed every time an item is released,

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so that no specific checks are missed.

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It can also help ensure all necessary data is present so that every item released with this workflow is at least consistent.

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It is important to remember though that upchaining cannot check the validity of your data,

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but it can at least check that certain data is present so that the reviewers involved can focus on qualifying the data.

05:09

Let's consider the following primitives that can provide the kind of functionality we're looking for in our workflow.

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The object decision primitive checks each item for specific attributes or files and produces a task for each item that fails this check.

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It can also prevent the workflow from continuing until the necessary attributes are or files are present and filled in.

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This primitive can be used for steps 1 to 3 in our workflow.

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The system primitive contains an option to check that all assemblies and drawings are up to date,

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and can even fix anything that is out of date for you if you desire.

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This primitive can be used for step 4 in our workflow, as well as the final step to release the items.

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The decision primitive is used to assign tasks to a single person or to everyone with a specific role on the project team or a group of people.

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You can further specify how many people must complete this task before it'll move on.

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This is a good primitive to use to track acceptance or rejection comments,

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and loop your workflow back to the appropriate step to try again, rather than cancel the workflow outright.

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We will use this primitive for each of our review steps 5 to 7.

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We'll also, of course, include the other necessary primitives, including start, stop, and update as they exist in the current system workflow.

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This video should get you thinking about what might be possible with Upchain,

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and how you can start to translate your existing business processes for releasing items into a change request workflow in Upchain.

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Please review the Upchain help documentation to review the capabilities of these different primitives as well as the additional primitives available.

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But don't worry about fully understanding them now.

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We'll start to configure this workflow in Upchain in this lesson.

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So, keep going.