4.1           The Workflow Assistant

The Workflow Assistant serves to represent workflow steps and milestones in the project planning. It is normally used to manage complex workflows. The mechanical and the electrical design of a project are examples for such individually definable workflows. However, you can also describe general project management workflows.

Every workflow is characterized by its different statuses and by the possible transitions between them. These status changes enable you to check specific conditions before the transition is made. For instance, this check can be done before running an assistant (e.g. as a quality assurance check) or on manually entering information. On actually carrying out a status change, assistants can also be executed automatically.

Links to a PLM system or creating an output of the documentation as Smart PDF files are examples of that option. In addition, parallel workflows can be set to different statuses.

You can freely select on which level the Workflow Assistant is used. In addition to the project, the following objects can be configured:

·            Equipment

·            Functions

·            Locations

·            Documents

·            Tasks

The respective statuses of the workflows are saved in the attributes at the respective object. Moreover, the Workflow Assistant enables you to retrieve an overview of the statuses of several objects in one action, so that you can quickly get a comprehensive overview.