Part, Document and CAD Document Revisions

Hi Brian, It seems that you know this, but I'll underscore that doing things this way isn't a good idea, and is totally counter to typical BOM management practices and ASME Y14.100 / ASME Y14.35. But with that disclaimer... In the past, I worked in an organization that had a similar practice to yours. I was told that the constraints of the MRP system required that all Drawings, CAD Models, and the Part record itself have matching revision levels. We were using Enovia but I believe that the philosophical nature of your question makes the particular PLM solution irrelevant. The way we handled it was completely manual. It was understood by the designers and engineers that all items must be revised together. Despite it being manual, things worked out fine. Maybe 1 out of 100 times there would be a mismatch and we would have to fix it. In Innovator, if you use ECO's this usually takes care of itself since the impact matrix will go find the CAD. In the planning phase, make sure that the action is set to revise for all these Items. If you use the MCO mechanism to adjust the AML of the Part when required, then things will probably be fine since the AML doesn't bump major_rev. You should disable to Manual Release Action for both the Part and the CAD Document, and be sure that only the Aras PLM identity is able to execute the transition from Preliminary to Released. This will prevent users from accidentally circumventing the ECO Process, and help make sure things don't slip through the cracks. If you wanted to move to the next level of automation, you could create a method and attach it to the Lifecycle transition to Released for each of the ItemTypes you need to manage. It could query the other related items and be sure that they are all on the same change Item. In Innovator, If something were to become mis-matched, the "lagging" record(s) would have to be revised, first individually, to bring it to the same revision level. But because released Items have fixed behavior, the other items will still be pointing to the previous revision, so once you've revised the lagging record on it's own, everything will have to be revised together to fix the relationships. Best, Mike