This topic is contained in the PDXpert help file: select Contents from the application's Help menu.
Departments/groups
Purpose
Defines each team (e.g., engineering, manufacturing, marketing) or individual (quality manager, purchasing director) that has a distinct responsibility for approving changes.
This collection's members depend upon members of the Organizations collection. For example, expand the home organization node in the Collection Explorer to view its departments and groups.
Where used
Change form and related workflow
Data fields
General tab
- Name
- This is the complete name for the department (or group).
- Description
- This describes the department and its function.
- Owning organization
- Use this combobox to select the department's organization (which is typically your own organization).
Approvers tab
You can specify who is authorized to approve changes on behalf of the department/group. Drag one or more users (who have sufficient permissions) from the Persons collection, and drop onto the list area.
To be able unlock the change form and provide a response, an approver must be assigned a full-function license.
Setup suggestions
Understand the departments and groups that impact your PLM process.
- Departments are organizational divisions, and reflect where formal responsibility is assigned: engineering, manufacturing, procurement, marketing.
- Groups perform ad hoc, cross-departmental functions, and reflect what a person does: program manager, design engineer, quality manager, production supervisor, CM analyst. Since a person can be assigned to more than one department/group, you may have program managers in marketing and manufacturing, or engineers in engineering and purchasing.
Whether you choose to define departments, groups, or a combination is up to you. However, if your process is organizationally oriented (for example, the quality manager, engineering manager and production manager approve design changes on all projects), you'll probably work primarily with departments. Conversely, if your company is project-oriented, then job classifications (program manager, project engineer, product marketing manager) may be more appropriate.
If a single person represents a unique role or authority (for instance, the engineering VP), and has unique reviewing responsibilities, give that person his/her own group.
Every department/group should have at least one person listed on the Approvers tab. If there's no one assigned to the department, then the department is irrelevant to your product management process and probably can be deleted.
2017
Help topics describe the most current PDXpert PLM software release, and may differ from earlier releases.
