Overview

This sample teaches you to develop, deploy and run a product lifecycle management (PLM) industry specific monitor model using the WebSphere Business Monitor Development Toolkit V6.2 on either Rational Application Developer V7.5.1 or WebSphere Integration Developer V6.2. The PLM sample monitor model tracks the status of ECRs submitted into the engineering change request process.

In this sample, you will be doing the following:

• create a dimension to display ECR status on a pie chart.
• create some key performance indicators (KPIs) to display ECR status, ECR process duration.
• create alerts for situations when there are too many pending ECRs and for ECRs that are in process for too long.
• create a bar chart to analyze the total number of ECRs based on time dimension.
• create a KPI history and prediction widget to show the history of total number of ECRs.
• create line charts to report monthly total number of ECRs and approval duration.

Here is a diagram of the verband der automobilindustrie (VDA) reference ECR process:

To determine the extent and impact of the planned change, the user submits an Engineering Change Request document through the Manage Engineering Change gateway using any of the available channels. After submission of the document the following process determines the decision to accept or reject the planned change response to be returned to the user. The process includes five phases in whole, in which each phase has its own task with the ECR. The phase Inquiry of ECR serves to receive proposals for ECRs. After that, the phase Creation of ECR will actually create the ECR and describe it explicitly. Next, the phase Technical Analysis of ECR is to determine technical aspects of the ECR and to gain an initial overview of its impact. The fourth phase Commenting on ECR examines the ECR from some points of view with regard to its impact on topics such as prototyping, certification, etc. After completion of previous phases, a decision should be take in the phase Approval of ECR.

Of the 5 phases in the ECR process, we have chosen to model the first phase explicitly, with human tasks for each of the sub-steps within this phase. As a showcase, we create monitor model based on the Inquire VDA ECR business process:

ECR requests are submitted to an Inquire VDA ECR business process. ECR request will be received and evaluated. Finally the process will provide the ECR status to indicate whether the ECR is accepted or rejected.