_Windchill Customization: Improving Authorization & Identity Management in Global Luxury Product Development

Project Background

The Authorization & Identities Management project has been started to define some common authorization templates for all the organizations in a renowned luxury group – recognized for its mastery in high-end watches, jewelry, fashion, and accessories, with a presence in key luxury markets across Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Americas, and the Middle East – to share the same schema.

Additionally, it changes the way how user access rights are identified and defined.

For a manufacturer in the luxury goods industry, TT PSC provided consulting, analysis of the organization’s requirements and advanced PLM system customization for Authorization & Identities of digital assets as part of a Windchill implementation service.

Known for its excellence in high-end watches, jewelry, fashion, and accessories, the group spans key luxury markets in Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Americas, and the Middle East. We have launched a project to create common authorization templates for all involved product development teams within the global luxury group.

Business Challenges

Windchill does not provide any template that would help to standardize work with Profiles and Access Rights for all Organizations at once.

Access control management in this superior luxury label group was performed by every Organization on their own, and it was hard to read. Nobody was able to have a clear vision of who was accessing what.

The new approach should be easy to use for all users from every organization and should also have the same workflow for every Organization.

• Windchill doesn’t offer any template to standardize profiles and access rights across all organizations simultaneously.
• Access control management within this overarching luxury group was fragmented, with each organization managing it independently, leading to confusion and lack of clarity on access permissions.
• The new approach aims to be user-friendly for all users across every organization, ensuring a consistent workflow for each entity. Simplifying access control management to provide clarity on who has access to what resources.

Solution

TT PSC has designed a lot of custom actions that can be easily accessed directly from the Windchill page, depending on access rights.

TT PSC has implemented extensive Winchill customization, enabling easy access to custom actions directly from the Windchill page, depending on access rights.

1. Change Profile, which easily helps to switch users between predefined profiles.

The simple page that lists all the profiles assigned to the user. Underneath, it automatically manages user assignments to proper groups related to the profile.

2. Update Access wizard. which allows to assign and remove new Profiles, Licenses and Access Rights to the user. Granting access is possible not only for a single user but also for a specific Organization or Profile.

Those actions have their own workflow that is deciding if the action must be approved by Administrators to prevent users from adding and removing profiles on their own.

User can see the history of granted and obtained access and export the table to CSV file. There is also a feature to create the same new user in ThingWorx if it doesn’t exist there.

3. Enquire about ZMs wizard helps the users to quickly see which access rights are assigned to specific User/Organization/Profiles, implemented using Handsontable and Vue with Excel report generation.

4. User Request wizard helps with creating new users with 3 different types: Company/From an external company/Virtual. During the creation process, the user can decide what Licenses or Access Rights will be assigned to the user and if the user should be created in ThingWorx if it doesn’t exist there.

In almost all actions, TT PSC used the Angular framework bundled with Windchill to have a more modern approach to building frontends.

There are also command line tools that help to clean up/synchronize users/profiles/groups, which are based on the common Java framework mentioned and created during Batch Job Monitor implementation.

Results

Implementation of such tools helped major upscale goods group simplify the process of making authorization templates for all Organizations. This has greatly improved the performance of assigning/removing rights for users. Additionally, it’s way easier to visualize the current configuration.