Setup: Places/Organizations/Persons

The Places/Organizations/Persons collections define the human environment and how it's organized.

The Collections reference help topics give more details about the following collections. Read these configuration guidelines, and then decide how you'll configure the collection properties and its members.

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

• Currencies: You'll need to review the members to ensure that the currencies you'll use in your supply chain are represented, and the exchange rates are up to date. Refresh the active currencies by selecting Tools ➔ Update Currencies...

• Countries: Over 200 countries are included in the starting database, but the most won't be needed 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.

• 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, administrator). Although it's possible to make a unique role for each user (e.g., John's role), this becomes difficult to manage when the number of users is large and you decide to change the permissions for a group of users.

• Persons: You can add each person who has interest in your PLM data. A person doesn't need a PDXpert log-in account and, if you're entering contact information for partner organizations, often won't be given one. However, you must first add a person to this collection if you're giving them a user account.

  • Rename the default Persons member, Admin, with the application administrator's actual name. This does not change the default user account log-in name (admin), it only affects the person's name that's shown in data windows and reports.
  • If you have licensed more than one full-function user account, you can replace the default admin user account with a different log-in name.

  To create and change user accounts, see the Manage user accounts help topic.

  The Batch Importer tool can import new Persons collection members and create user accounts.

• Groups: Groups identify one or more persons who have a special responsibility or authority in your organization. To learn about designing groups for your change workflow, see the How to use groups help topic.

  The default person is assigned to the default group.

  • If the group's name doesn't show the correct reviewing responsibility, change the group's name.
  • Review and, if needed, update the group's Persons list.

  The Batch Importer tool can import new Groups collection members and persons.

• Organizations: There are two basic types of organization within PDXpert: the home organization and partner organizations.

  Home organization

  The home organization:

  • 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

  Since the home organization information is used extensively within PDXpert, and may be exported to other computer systems and supply-chain partners, ensure that this information is complete.

  • The Name is determined by your software license key (Tools ➔ Software License Key…).
  • The Display name is used throughout the application. The default, Home, should be updated to what your company prefers to use as a short name, acronym, or abbreviation.
  • Add the URL/website and the Address page, as these are included in PDX packages that you share with supply chain partners.

  Partner organizations

  Partner organizations are the home organization's suppliers, contract manufacturers, customers, regulatory agencies and other entities that affect your product data and procedures. A partner record can be as brief as a company name and display name. The level of detail you provide is usually related to the user interaction with that organization.

  The Batch Importer tool can import new Organizations collection members.

User access setup §

Simple is best.

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

• Roles let you limit whether users can view pending and/or released and/or canceled documents, parts and changes. They also let you decide whether users can make documents, parts and changes, and whether they can add or work with changes.
• Product Families can be used to determine who can view items relating to a design feature, 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.
• The system gives the author of a new item iteration the trustee role for that iteration, and has special permissions for managing that record.
• Pending, released and canceled items may have different behaviors and visibility.
• Viewing, copying and modifying file attachments can be limited by guest role, product family exclusion, or product team membership.
• Administrators have rights to modify items, even previously-released items, using the Tools menu: Administrator override command.

These access permissions and limits 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 procedures, you can probably apply that control using PDXpert's built-in security.

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