Engineering Workbench: Intergrated Pprocessing of Routings and Bills of Material 

Installation information

The Enginnering Workbench has NOT been released officially. However you can test it, but the fuctionality is limited. If you want to test it, create a problem message to this effect in OSS for the component PP-BD-RTG.

In particular the following restrictions apply to the Engineering Workbench at the moment:

• Bill of material objects cannot be processed.

• Material component cannot be processed.

Description

The Engineering Workbench is an environment for maintaining product structures and operations. The potential far exceeeds that of the conventional maintenance of bills of material and routings. The most important objects in the Workbench are BOM items and operations. Views of these objects are avaialble that present the conventional structures of bills of material and routings. In addition to this, other views are now available that were previously not possible. All of the maintenance fuctions, such as Create, Change and Delete are supported on all these views.

The significance of this is

• Integrated processing
  

You no longer have to process routings and bills of material separately. Just select those Engineering Workbench objects that you want to process, for instance material, PRT or operation. You place your selection in a working area. For instance, you can have separate working areas for design and production.

• Complex selection criteria
  

You can select any object in your working area by its attributes. You can combine all the selections logically.

• Simulataneous processing
  

Several users can process any item (operation) from any BOM (routing) at the same time. If you want to edit a BOM item (operation) that is being processed by somebody else, the Engineering Workbench tells this is, so that you can contact him to coordinate the changes. The other user can release the BOM item (operation) for you without having to interrupt his work.

• User support
  

You change or delete the objects you have selected in the Engineering Workbench . You can also create or copy new objects. You execute all of these functions from an uniform user interface. You can save intermediate results, without interrupting your work in the Engineering Workbench . This means you can execute complex tasks efficiently.