Nuances of Display Rule – A Peek into Addressing Problems Holistically
This blog is created as a response and solution to the above PLM challenge, This is a part of our weekly Wiser Wednesday Challenge on Linkedin – Aimed to add value to the PLM community.
Check out Quiz #1 on our Linkedin page.
Indeed, the Display Rule is the answer, but there is more to it than getting to a better solution. Imagine you have 35 departments added to your Teamcenter configuration. And now you want to hide every department in the display rule except Procurement.
Firstly, it's a heck of a job, to add these 34 departments one-by-one in the Display Rule configuration.
Secondly, think of a scenario in which in future, 1 more department is added to the organization, you must also add this new department to your display rule.
You might say it's not a big deal to add 1 more department to the Display Rule of 1 business object. But, in real-world scenarios, we are not just talking about 1 business object. We could have many more are more business objects like 'Raw Material', 'Design', 'Tools' etc. with each demanding a similar restrictive display rule set up.
So it's not just about adding one department in the Display Rule, but there is quite a lot of impact assessment that needs to be done and also a lot of effort with increased risk of making human errors.
Thirdly, this would mean that for any new department addition, we will need to have a BMIDE deployment and will have to plan for a Production downtime.
Hmm, so that solution may not be as straightforward as it appears if we consider all these aspects. So what will be the optimum solution that we can propose?
Display Rules are designed to hide objects instead of showing objects to a group/role in the organization. But it also provides conditional enablement of Display Rules.
In this case, we can add a hiding Display Rule for all groups in the organization with a condition to skip the 'Procurement' group. Typically the condition would look as below
u.group_name != 'Procurement'
This way of configuration will make the solution scalable and will be able to take care of all the scenarios that may have an impact if things change in future.
Now no matter how many departments are added/deleted, the solution is not impacted and Procurement will always be the only department that can view and create Menu for the Raw Material and no other department.
Blog by Digvijay Gavas.
