Setup: Places/Organizations/Persons

The Places/Organizations/Persons collections define the human environment and how it's organized. It begins with the most general (trans-country Languages) through the most specific (Persons).

Each collection listed in this section is described in the Collections reference topics. Read these configuration guidelines, then decide how you'll configure the collection properties and its members.

Languages: Unless you need to increase the languages that you use for product labeling, you can probably leave the current list alone.

Currencies: You'll need to review the current members to ensure that the currencies you'll use in your supply chain are represented, and the exchange rates are up to date.

Countries: Over 200 countries are included in the starting database, but the vast majority will not be required to support your supply chain. You can choose to delete unused countries or simply make them inactive, which retains them for future reactivation.

Partner classifications: This collection classifies the different types of organizations in your supply chain.

Organizations: There are two basic types of organization within PDXpert: the home organization, and partner organizations. The home organization defines the core of your PLM process, and typically:

owns the PDXpert software license
controls the final product designs that are managed within PDXpert
issues proprietary identifiers to identify purchased parts and documents in PDXpert
always issues the change forms used to manage items within PDXpert
manages the users who have access to PDXpert

Partner organizations are the home organization's suppliers, contract manufacturers, customers, regulatory agencies and other entities that affect your product data and processes.

Since the home organization information is used extensively within PDXpert, and may be exported to other computer systems and supply-chain partners, it's essential that this information is accurate and complete. On the other hand, a partner record can be as brief as a company name and abbreviation. The level of detail you provide is usually related to the amount of user interaction with that organization.

Departments/groups: You add departments (like Engineering, Quality, Sales) or groups of people with similar responsibilities (like design engineers, production managers, product managers) to each organization by selecting Add Department from that organization's context menu on the Collection Explorer. You don't have to exhaustively list every department, but only those that have people who affect your parts, documents and changes.

Roles: Each role usually represents a unique set of permissions. You can choose the simple approach of keeping the number of roles small (read-only, guest, normal, analyst, admin), and assigning a role to each user. Although it's possible to create a role for each user (e.g., "John's role"), this will become too cumbersome to manage when the number of users is large and you decide to change the permissions for a group of users.

Persons: You'll want to add each person who has some responsibility for data within your LM process. A person need not have a PDXpert log-in account and, if you're entering contact information for partner organizations, often will not.

User access setup

Simple is best.

Although PDXpert provides a great deal of flexibility in defining security roles, and allowing you to restrict user access from a variety of perspectives, you probably do not want to get too ambitious too early.

There are a lot of interesting capabilities relating to user access:

Roles let you restrict whether users can view pending and/or released and/or canceled documents, parts and changes. They also let you decide whether users can create documents, parts and changes, and whether they can add or process changes.
Product families can be used to determine who can view items relating to a specific product line, and who is excluded. They can separately have team members who have special rights to change certain item attributes (such as part cost) regardless of the item's release state.
A user who creates a new item revision is self-assigned the trustee role for that revision, and has special permissions for managing that revision.
Pending, released and canceled items may have different behaviors and visibility.
Viewing, copying and modifying file attachments can be restricted by guest role, product family exclusion, or product team membership.
Administrators have additional rights to modify items, even previously-released items, using the Administrator Override rule.

These access permissions and restrictions are all a standard part of PDXpert, and automatically take care of many security issues.

So, start out simple. As you discover the need for tighter control over certain items or processes, chances are you'll be able to apply that control using PDXpert's built-in security.

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