Item identification

Organizations that manufacture products must also create information that show how to produce, inspect, use and service the products.

Each product is modeled using part records, and the parts and produces are described using documents. The organization organizes part and document records by giving each one its own number.

Class §

Items are system records that contain information about your products. PDXpert has three classes of items:

  • A document record describes a part or procedure, or gives information to assist with procurement, manufacture, test, inspection, or maintenance and repair.
  • A part record represents a physical object that is fabricated, purchased, assembled or consumed to produce other parts and, ultimately, final products. The record gives physical properties (such as unit of measure, mass, components) as well as non-physical attributes (regulatory requirements, test procedures or other references).
  • A change form identifies a group of part and document records and
    • changes their release status; or
    • identifies future document or part changes, or identifies a temporary change to a part or product.

Regardless of its purpose, an item always has an owning organization, an item type, an identifier number and a description.

Item owner §

Organizations design and manage items; their intellectual and financial investment establishes their ownership in the item.

The home organization is the organization that licenses and operates PDXpert. This organization owns all proprietary information that is develops: requirements, procedures, and specifications; part fabrication, assembly and sourcing data; and design files and records. The home organization decides when parts and documents are released, revised and canceled in PDXpert, and thus owns all change forms.

Each partner organization – such as supplier, regulatory agency, or customer – develops and manages its proprietary documents and parts, and gives these to the home organization. PDXpert doesn't allow partners to be change form owners.

Item number §

The item number is a string of characters that the owning organization gives to an item to uniquely identify it.

An item type may subscribe to an identifier sequence, which represents the set of rules for how an item number format is constructed. A sequence can be used by one or more item types.

Item type §

An item's type defines its properties and behavior—in other words, the rules that the item follows. Once you've selected the type, the specified rules are permanently applied to the item.

Name (parts) / Title (documents) / Description (change forms) §

The item description field gives the item's purpose and characteristics, and typically uses an agreed-upon descriptive format.

The description doesn't uniquely identify the item; other items can have the same description. However, the description contains the item's key search text and is exported to downstream manufacturing and support systems. It's good practice to keep the original description after the item's first release.

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