Releasing revised items in Upchain

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In this video, we explore the process for releasing an item a second time and explore 3D comparisons, BOM comparisons, release types,

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and Linking Investigation Requests to the Change Request.

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So let's take a look.

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Once you've made all desired changes to your items, you'll need to make sure that you save all of your changes.

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This could be checking in the CAD and drawings if applicable, or simply updating item attribute information in the web application.

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Then, we release it again using a new Change Request. Let's send our drone assembly to a new Change Request.

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We'll do this from the web application, but remember we could have done it from the cart in the CAD plugin as well.

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To send our assembly to a new Change Request, locate the item and load it into the center view, click the action menu,

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hover your mouse over "Send to", then click Change Request.

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A new Change Request is created and the assembly with all of its children is brought into the Change Request.

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But remember only those items in development will be released during this Change Request.

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Because we have made some design changes, let's explore the 3D comparison tool.

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For items that contain mechanical CAD,

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Upchain automatically generates a 3D comparison between the item that is currently being released and its previous released version.

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All areas that have been added are shown in green and all areas that have been removed are shown in red.

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This can help you and the approvers visually see what design changes have been made to confirm that they are correct.

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Another tool that we can take advantage of this time around is the BOM comparison tool found at the bottom of the window.

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This is also automatically generated by Upchain and compares the bill of materials of the item that is currently being released,

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and its previous released version.

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The left side here shows the BOM structure from the previous release,

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and the right side shows the BOM of the item being released on this Change Request.

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Certain attribute changes are highlighted in yellow and you can hover your mouse over the tooltip to see what attributes have changed.

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Items that are added to the bill of materials are highlighted in green and any items that have been removed are highlighted in red.

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Again, this is useful to see how the BOM may have changed from one item version to the next,

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and helps to ensure that items have not been accidentally added or removed from the previous item version.

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This is especially useful with a very large bill of materials.

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Now, since these changes were a result of an Investigation Request,

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we should link the Investigation Request to this Change Request to ensure the full story behind the change can be fully traced.

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Again, you should do this to allow anyone,

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who reviews this Change Request to understand where the original request for this change came from in the first place.

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Lastly, let's ensure the items are ready to be released. All released types have already been set to Major, this is the default.

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If any of these needs to be changed, you would simply put the Change Request into edit mode and you could change them to Minor.

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You could do this based on what the revision note says.

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All revision notes have already been filled out as well from the previous videos,

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because the person who made the changes did so at the time of the change.

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Again, if this information was not filled out or you needed to make a change,

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you could do so here by ensuring, again, the Change Request was in edit mode, and then fixing up or typing in the revision note.

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Again, it is best to ensure this information is filled out at the time of the change, so that it's fresh in that person's mind.

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And that way, you don't have to worry about filling this out here at the time of release.

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Lastly, let's edit the header information. We'll set the priority to match the priority of the Investigation Request.

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This just helps other users understand the priority.

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We'll input a description. Again, this helps users see at a quick glance what this Change Request is for.

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We'll choose a workflow and we said previously our items are ready for production.

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So we'll choose the production item maturity level here.

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Save your changes...

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And now you can start the Change Request workflow.

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In our example, the project manager must approve the Change Request before it completes and releases the items.

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There, the items are currently pending and it is waiting for the project manager to now release the items.

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You can see that the task to release the items has been created and assigned to the project manager.

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So now signed in as the project manager.

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They can review the information we just did ourselves in the 3D comparison tool, the BOM comparison tool,

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review the revision note information, review the Investigation Request where this change came from,

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and then they can go ahead and release the items if they're satisfied with all of that information.

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Now, the items are released.

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You can see the Major and Minor revision levels have been incremented and the version on the item is now set back to 0.

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The item maturity has also been updated to production as we chose on the Change Request.

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One thing you may have learned in the mCAD courses is how to add drawing codes to your drawings.

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These codes are converted when the item is released to their actual values on the DWG and PDF translations.

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So your Upchain administrator needs to have these two translations enabled to use these codes.

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These codes include basic item attributes as well as the revision history of the item.

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In this assembly drawing example, you can see that we have configured a revision table to capture the previous three revisions,

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and we have populated the title block with information, including item name and number, current revision level,

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and people who have checked and approved the drawing.

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Search "drawing codes" in our help center to learn more.