Sort of covered in an old thread, but not really resolved to what would help me because that solution dealt with permissions and I have no idea how or why that would work for my situation. We cannot take away approve permissions to the engineers.
Need to checkin from Workbench without the Revision getting approved. We have to go into Part Maintenance and then unapprove. Leaving it approved tells operations that they can go ahead and use that new rev, even if that new rev isn’t ready. It has to go through a few groups outside of engineering and then when everyone is ready, it gets “turned on” and Approved and the old rev is unapproved.
We do periodically leave the old rev approved during a transition persiod, so changing their workflow to check if both are approved is not a solution here.
Why is it done this way??? In a very large organization if there’s a gap between the check-in with approval and unapproving, its very well possible for a kanban, purchase or other event to occur on that unreleased revision.
Well… you are right. I would LOVE an idea to be created in Epicor Ideas https://epicor-manufacturing.ideas.aha.io/ideas to allow check-in WITHOUT approval. This problem has bothered me as well.
In the past, I did create a BPM option that allowed this for a customer. you would check a box, and then check the part it. The BPM would fire and unapprove it after it was checked in. but you should not have to do this. It should simply be an option to check in without approving first.
I think one reason is because there is an approval cycle within the EWB, and if you are using the approvals, the only way to keep you from checking in is if it is not approved, and the only way to approve is to go through the workflow… but if not using the workflow, this is not an “excuse”.
As Tim mentioned, Engineering Workbench can use an approval process that must be completed before a revision can be checked-in/approved. It’s the same capability used by CRM, HelpDesk, Time and Expense Entry.
As MarkW suggested, a Task Set might take care of routing thru your review groups - before checking in and/or approving revisions.
The one problem I had with Task Sets… I couldn’t find much in the way of instructions (the last time I checked).
So attached a doc that might give you some ideas (but it’s very old… Vantage 8). ECO Workflow and Tasks.doc (793.5 KB)
It’s especially annoying when you are trying to DMT mass changes you have to watch what is approved and not approved very carefully. It’s bit us a few times.
I think Epicor’s base intent here would have been that it should stay checked out into a specific engineering group for the duration of it being in process. Maybe that engineering group ID being just the part number or whatever. If you want to control not too many cooks in the kitchen I think that is what the single user mode is for, but we never use it so I can’t speak to its efficacy.
