The status enables you to define significant states or life-cycle phases that your products, or parts of these products, must achieve by a specific date. The user or person responsible for a product sets a status and thereby documents that a development phase has been completed or a certain state has been reached.

You can edit the status data for the following iPPE objects in the product designer:

• Engineering node
  Node types that were created as copies of node type S_GEN (generic node type for the engineering environment).
• Component variant (variant type S_CMPST)

In Customizing for Integrated Product and Process Engineering (iPPE), a status has been defined and an assignment to the iPPE object (such as component variant) has been defined, in the Settings for Status Management.

In addition to the obligatory status values, you can define optional preconditions. For example, you define agreements for enterprise areas marketing, engineering, and production as necessary preconditions. In the product designer Web application, an employee can specify the extent to which the preconditions are fulfilled, and set the corresponding status.

When you display the object-specific page of one of these iPPE objects, the list of views contains the entry Status.

1. Click on the Status view.

• The table contains the status that was defined in Customizing for the iPPE object (for example, component variant). The status is presented as a link.
• In addition, the status value and due date are displayed for each status.

2. Click on the link to the status.

3. Enter the status data.

• Status value
  The possible entries list all the possible values.
• Due date
  Enter the data on which you want the iPPE object to have reached this status.
• Person responsible
  Enter the person or organization unit (for example, department) that is responsible for setting the status.

4. Save the status. The changed data is saved to R/3.

After saving, you see information on the status change you made, above the header data.