Manage & Control

The 5 Components of Change Management

We’ve covered why a formal change process is important and how Cloud Services can help you implement one. If you’re new to change management, you might be wondering how to structure your formal process.

SOLIDWORKS Cloud Services customer Bowhead started by defining the elements of change management:

For a deep dive into Bowhead’s change management process, you can view the full webinar below.

Product Data Management on the Cloud with 3DEXPERIENCE Works

How to Initiate a Change Action

When a design is shared with internal or external collaborators, those collaborators will review the design through the browser-based Collaborative Designer dashboard.

For more information, see Getting Started with a Formal Design Change Process Using Change Actions.

Recommended Formal Design Release and Revise Workflow

For engineering teams that require a formal design release and revise process, change actions are used to automate the promotion of physical products and drawings to the Released maturity state and to automate the creation of new revisions. Change actions can govern access rights and control the lifecycle of the process.

The image below shows an example of a basic change action workflow using the pre-configured “out of the box” behaviour. This represents the recommended use case for SOLIDWORKS customers.

Change Action Workflow

For an in-depth overview and detailed best practices, please refer to the Formal Design Change Process SolidPractices guide.

Defining a Bespoke Approval Process

In a situation where reviewing and approving a change will involve multiple people, you might want to define a route approval process. Routes in 3DEXPERIENCE are used to automatically generate tasks that are then automatically assigned to team members to take action. Any stage of a route can include one or more people and can be configured so that either all or just one of the people are required to give approval before the route moves to the next task.

When creating a change action, a route can be selected as the approver instead of an individual person.

For an in-depth overview and detailed best practices, please refer to Route Management SolidPractices guide.

Managing Design Change with Issues Capture

If desired, you can expand the change process further so that anyone within your company can initiate an issue related to a SOLIDWORKS design, and that issue can then be used to drive a change action. Issues are captured and managed using the Issues Management app available in the Collaborative Industry Innovator role.

Issues are a great way for anyone in your company to capture and document an issue related to a design, and then share that information directly with the relevant person or department in your organization.

Design Focused Issue Management

Change Management Methodology

For a detailed explanation and use case demonstrating how issues can be used in combination with change actions, please refer to the Formal Design Change SolidPractices Guide.

Expanding the Solution Beyond Collaborative Industry Innovator

If you’re operating in a regulated industry and need to formally manage a high degree of change to complex products, the Change Manager role offers a scalable solution that expands on the capabilities of Collaborative Industry Innovator.

Using issues in combination with the Change Manager (CHG) role, issues can drive change orders, and a change order can drive multiple change actions. Issues can also govern a change request that, in turn, governs a series of change orders, and those change orders can drive multiple change actions.

To learn more about the Change Manager role, please refer to the following courses available in the 3DEXPERIENCE Works Training library:

• Explore the Change Manager Role
• Perform as a Change Manager

Once users are comfortable working with change actions and routes, their workflows can be expanded to include other capabilities (e.g. Issues Management and 3D Markup).