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Currently we are adding the name to the history description to show who needs to review a file. How can we automate that extra step? We'd like to be able to search for persons too (who has to review what etc.). Is that possible?


I asked this question also here and got this response:

Any better ideas on how to tackle this problem?


Edit: Our current workaround is, that we mention the person/department in our comment. That way we can track it at least through the history.

It's possible to set your workflow to notify approval groups in parallel. Additionally, you can set it up to email them daily after a certain amount of time until it's complete. If you go that route, I recommend getting the emails forwarded to your user's email inbox rather than the PDM inbox. PDM inbox is easy to ignore.

This layout seems similar to what I'm thinking from a simple workflow perspective.
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The data card would have to support what you're looking for in terms of whether the assigned person/group has completed their approval task since there are a lot of ways to go about it. For example, if QA submits their approval then you could set the individual's name/approval date on the data card and check to see if any approvals remain.

If you have a data card example and a flow chart of your approval process (not necessarily the workflow flow chart) then we may be able to provide more helpful advice.

If you have a data card example and a flow chart of your approval process (not necessarily the workflow flow chart) then we may be able to provide more helpful advice.

We are not yet set on our data cards and are willing to change there.
PDM is only fully integrated with our Design department, so our approval process through PDM is pretty easy:

1. Author sends file that is work in progress out to be reviewed by person x, state goes to review
   1. if approved by person x - state moves to ready to release & goes back to author
   2. if rejected by person x - state moves back to work in progress & goes back to author
2. in state ready to release, author can move state to released

Does that help?

berg_lauritz wrote: ↑Thu Jun 24, 2021 5:01 pm We are not yet set on our data cards and are willing to change there.
PDM is only fully integrated with our Design department, so our approval process through PDM is pretty easy:

1. Author sends file that is work in progress out to be reviewed by person x, state goes to review
   1. if approved by person x - state moves to ready to release & goes back to author
   2. if rejected by person x - state moves back to work in progress & goes back to author
2. in state ready to release, author can move state to released

Does that help?

Not sure I entirely understand the question and I'm not a PDM guy so take this FWIW.

You can add quite a few "States" to your work flow. Don't know what the limit is but we have 35-40 of them. Our workflow is generally Released from Eng>Document Acknowledgement>MFG approval. We also have several different departments so once out of Engineering we have the option to send them to "Doc Aknowledgement"[any department] and also a couple MFG departments. We also have several other states outside of Engineering use.

So what you could do is set up states with people. It would probably be better to do it similar to we did and make states of the position rather than the person so if that person quotes you don't have to redo the states...we have names on a couple of ours and it's an issue.

Once the states are implemented you can search for those states in the PDM search. You can also search by person who made the state change although that may not help you because you're looking for the name of the person the state is waiting on.

So if Engineering releases something for "Manufacturing approval" you can just search for all files that are in the state "Manufacturing approval" and You'll know whether Bob is doing his job and approving parts or just letting them pile up.

Once the states are implemented you can search for those states in the PDM search. You can also search by person who made the state change although that may not help you because you're looking for the name of the person the state is waiting on.

@MJuric, that is exactly what we are searching for. We currently just write the name, who needs to review it into the history of the file, but I thought since you PDM even sends out notifications &/or emails to the reviewers, that this information should be available somewhere.

We want to avoid having a state for a person though & per department does not help either, if you want to know accurately.

Are we the only ones, who find that useful? I surely thought, this was a common problem!

berg_lauritz wrote: ↑Fri Jun 25, 2021 9:08 am We want to avoid having a state for a person though & per department does not help either, if you want to know accurately.

What I would do is have a state per "Function". So if it needs to be reviewed by "Product design" then you would have a "In Review Product Design" state, and so on.

If you have multiple people that need to do the same function you have a couple options.

Break it down to two state levels "Sent for Product Design Review">"Waiting for product design review 1" or something like that where 1 thru 100 are assigned to individuals. That way the document is sent to "Product design review" and the manager of product design would have to send it to the appropriate project manager/Engineer for review etc.

Lump it into one single group and use PDM notifications. I have even less experience with this so you might want to ask around or contact your VAR. I know that individuals can set themselves up to be notified when a document enters or exits a certain state but I've not found a way to set this up so that someone can set an automatic notification to someone else if the state changes. I was looking into this for a different reason, to notify CNC programmers of state change, and did not find a great answer.

Ideally the set up would be "Notify these people/Group if the state of this files enters [STATE]" So you change it to "Product design review" and 10 people get an E-mail that the state of that part has changed. Then the person responsible for the review knows they need to review it.

The big drawback to this approach is that if you have lots of parts and lots of people reviewing everyone gets all the notices and that could get messy quick. This is why we did not do this. In house programmers might deal with 40% of actual part changes, so with 3-4 programmers each programmer might be getting 100 notices of which only 10 or less pertain to them. It turns into a SPAM situation and people start ignoring the notices.

@berg_lauritz What version of PDM are you on?

@jcapriotti it's SOLIDWORKS PDM 2019 (SP 3.0)

You can't really 'assign' a file to someone in PDM ... at least not as a 'out of the box function'.

However, I have created 'assigned to' variables on cards that can be updated for this purpose.

Nadia wrote: ↑Tue Jun 29, 2021 5:55 pm You can't really 'assign' a file to someone in PDM ... at least not as a 'out of the box function'.

However, I have created 'assigned to' variables on cards that can be updated for this purpose.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing....something like: Then add a Conditional Notification to the transition that sends it to approval and add the user assignment variable to send it to the name in the variable.
Too bad you can't do a conditional notifications for the "Delayed in state" notification.

jcapriotti wrote: ↑Tue Jun 29, 2021 6:04 pm Too bad you can't do a conditional notifications for the "Delayed in state" notification.

I don't know if it's an added feature in 2021 or one of the older releases, but when I was demoing 2021 there was an option to "remind" the notified parties after a number of days until they do their approval task.

AlexB wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 7:49 am I don't know if it's an added feature in 2021 or one of the older releases, but when I was demoing 2021 there was an option to "remind" the notified parties after a number of days until they do their approval task.

Yeah, that's the Delayed in state" notification. Not sure when it was added but it was in 2017. The problem with it is you can only pick a specific user or group to send it to. There is no way to send it just a person assigned to a variable like you can with Conditional Notifications.
Can only select a group or a user.

There are a few enhancement requests that are open for the Delayed in State feature. Here are the general summaries I have from my notes.
679884 - Only notify people who were notified when the file went into the state
748292 - Add options for only file creator and only last state modifier
796324 - Add option to send only to approvers who have not yet approved a parallel transition
1217052 - Enable the ability to create conditional notifications for delayed in state notifications

The Delayed in State notifications are cool but they don't necessarily go to a specific person. Usually, those are configured to a smaller subset of 'approver' users but not a specific person.

The nice thing about PDM (that some people see as a drawback) is that file ownership can only be triggered by the person who will actually own it, you can't necessarily assign a file to someone else.