This release revision includes 16 new UPK topics: nine Variant Management UPK topics, and seven AIA 2.5 Agile PLM Integration with E-Business Suite UPK topics.

I was asked this question by a PPM customer at the PLM Demo Booth. "How do I make sure that a project deliverable does not get deleted by a user?" I explained to the customer that this can be done rather easily, and that has been an existing feature since 9.2.2. The customer's response was "That information right there was worth the cost of attending Openworld!" I thought I would write a quick blog post explaining how this can be done, to the broader audience.

• Create Quarterly Sourcing Project
• Add Items (including BOM/AML) from Product Collaboration
• Lookup existing published prices or contracts - you can do sequential lookups as well
• Create RFQ for parts that need new pricing from the Suppliers
• Assign Suppliers - you can search for Suppliers using additional SDK APIs
• Open RFQ to Suppliers

With the above automation, the whole process can be completed in one-click, thus saving sufficient time for the sourcing user.

Wish there was an event like this for life questions. However, for any questions that you might have about how Oracle can help you run your business more efficiently and profitably, join us at Oracle Openworld in San Francisco next week. PLM Product Managers will be there along with some of our field experts to answer any questions that you might have about Oracle Agile PLM, and to show you a demo of the product. Come visit us on the Demogrounds at booth S018.

Besides the demos, there will be a host of very informative sessions to educate you on how PLM can help you innovate and stay ahead of the competition. Senior executives from our Strategy, Product Management and Development organizations will talk about the vision and future direction of Agile PLM. There will be customer presentations and panel discussions on driving innovation, compliance and margins with PLM. A number of industry-specific sessions throughout the conference are sure to get you the answers that you need, while offering an invaluable opportunity to network with peers from other companies. Click here for a complete list of sessions around Agile PLM.

But after a day of learning and networking, it is important to relax and have some fun. To that effect, there are a number of events hosted by Oracle as well as our partners. Or, if you prefer, just head on outdoors and enjoy the many sights and tastes of the beautiful city that is San Francisco. Hope to see you there.

Remember that the patch does not pack any other fixes or enhancements.

Understanding the impact of Business Intelligence goes beyond the individual reports and is more about understanding how operating your business with better information can improve results. What if you could quickly identify key product risks, critical process bottlenecks, and supply chain issues before they affect a product launch? Agile PLM organized your product data and enables your business processes, while Business Intelligence enables you to analyze the product data and process results to make better decisions about which actions to take next.

Synaptics will be talking about BI at their organization tomorrow, Tuesday October 6 at 11 AM US Pacific Time. Register at http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=101332&src=6769271&src=6769271&Act=36 to attend. From the event page "In this informal reference call, participants will have the opportunity to speak firsthand with Anan Siharath, Application Lead at Synaptics. The call will open with a brief overview, followed by candid discussion and an open question and answer session. Please allow one hour for the call."

This is a short post to illustrate usability improvement in one area of PPM. The use-case is that of adding new content to a project. Prior to 9.3, users had to search for content from the Content tab, and had to go through a couple of clicks to add that content. 9.3 retains that method and adds another (and in my opinion, cooler) method to add new content to the project.

(a) Type-ahead feature - if you already know the part number (or a to quickly search for the part if they already know the part number. As the user starts typing in the part number, the application automatically presents a list of matching parts and the user can select and add the matching part.
(b) Quick search (searching against the part number and part description) or Advanced Search (searching against all attributes of a part). You can use the keyboard shortcut CTRL-SHIFT-X to quickly Advanced Search.
(c) Copy/Paste - if you want to build a BOM based on parts from another BOM (say, building a prototype BOM based on few parts from a production BOM), you can copy the parts from the 1st BOM and paste them into the 2nd BOM. When you copy parts from one Item-BOM tab into another Item-BOM tab, the application also copies all the BOM fields along with those parts. In this case, it will also copy values like Qty, Reference Designators, BOM flex fields etc from one Item-BOM to another Item-BOM tab. But, if you copy parts from, for instance, Change-AI tab and paste them into Item-BOM tab, only the part will be added since there are no common fields between Item-BOM and Change-AI tabs. You can also copy multiple parts from the left pane and paste them into the right pane.
(d) Drag/Drop - if you have parts in your left pane (either in Bookmarks, Recently Visited or Navigator), you can drag multiple parts and drop them into the BOM table on the right.

You can also refer to the blog on Multi Windowing in 9.3, where you can visually look at multiple BOMs at the same time and copy parts from one BOM and paste them into the BOM in Item-BOM tab.

With Agile 9.3, we've introduced a new feature called "Workflow Signoff Duration" that tracks, for any workflow step that requires one or more reviewers to sign off, the number of days that have elapsed since the reviewer got notification of needing to sign off on an object (if he hasn't signed off yet) or the number of days the reviewer took to actually sign off on the object (if he has signed off on it). Not only can this field be monitored in real time, it can be reported on extensively to track performance metrics for key reviewers of any process.

This blog post addresses both issues and should provide customers and consultants with some good tips on managing colors in the PLM Dashboard.

Here are some simple examples of automation using Events and Scripting:

• Auto-fill attributes from related objects: It is useful to have values of certain attributes for an object to be cross-filled in from related objects. E.g. auto-fill document or change order details on the task they are related to. This can be done by setting up an event on the lifecycle of the content object or the task and values of selected attributes can be auto-filled. A specific example here is that of populating the 'Product Line' attribute of a project based on the product line of the BOM added to the 'PLM Reference' attribute of the project. The population of the attributes can be done via a script.



• Auto-select gate approvers based on product line: This is helpful since you can auto-select executive and management level approvers based on business unit or product line. This can be achieved by simply providing a map of approvers by 'business unit' or 'product line' attributes of a project via a script (achieved easily by using the hashmap functionality in Groovy). The event in this case can be triggered upon the start of the project.
  


• Iterative Tasks or Phase duplication: This has been a requirement from a few customers for a while. Product development is often an iterative process where a series of tasks or even an entire phase may need to be repeated because satisfactory results were not achieved in the first iteration. In this case, the series of tasks or the phase needs to be duplicated and the overall schedule of the project tree needs to be adjusted accordingly. This can be done by setting up an attribute 'Rework Required' on the milestone following the series of tasks to be duplicated. The 'Rework Required' attribute would be set to 'No' by default, and would be changed to 'Yes' if the series of tasks needs to be duplicated. An event would be triggered when the milestone is in 'Open' status, and a script launched by this event would duplicate the series of tasks if needed.
• Notifications based on critical path: It has been a requirement that task owners be automatically notified if their tasks are on the critical path of a project. This is where 9.3 events and platform new functionality shines through. Users can create custom notifications, which can be triggered by any event. In this case you can create a new notification that is sent to the user listed on the 'Owner' attribute of a task if the 'Critical' attribute of the task is set to 'Yes'. The event that this notification would be tied to would of course be updation of the task i.e. the event would be triggered whenever changes are made to any task object in the system. The 'Critical' attribute is automatically set when any user computes and saves the critical path using the Gantt Chart.