Vault ECO Role Confusion

[Neil_Cross]

I might be missing the point, I've demo'd ECOs and covered the basics but not to any great detail, until now.  

I have a user in Vault, this user has the Vault Role 'Change Order Editor (Level 2)'.

In the routing list, this user is the Change Requestor, Approver, Responsible Engineer and Reviewer.  Pretty much all the roles except Change Administrator. 

If I create an ECO with that user, I can save it to the Create state, I can submit it to the Open state, but that users involvement seems to stop there...? The option to submit to Work state is disabled.

So I made a second user with the exact same rights, and even that user cannot submit the ECO to the Work state.  I made a third user, who has 'Change Administrator' rights, this user CAN change the ECO to the Work state.  What gives?? This makes absolutely no sense to me.  If I give users the Change Administrator role so that they can submit ECOs to the Work state, that means they can also delete ECOs.  Can someone please clarify this as the Wikihelp is typically useless.

[Neil_Cross]

Well, 6 months later and noone has responded... 

I've found an official document from Autodesk that confirms only the Change Administrator can move an ECO from Open > Work.

This is absolutely insane, utterly garbage, and I'm sorry but I will go ape rage at anybody within Autodesk who uses the word 'flexible' to describe any aspect of the ECO system.  This is as restrictive as it gets.

[cbenner]

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@neil.cross wrote:

Well, 6 months later and noone has responded... 

I've found an official document from Autodesk that confirms only the Change Administrator can move an ECO from Open > Work.

This is absolutely insane, utterly garbage, and I'm sorry but I will go ape rage at anybody within Autodesk who uses the word 'flexible' to describe any aspect of the ECO system.  This is as restrictive as it gets.

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Personally, I find that comforting.  The CA is the only one who can submit an ECO to work... I wouldn't want just anyone to be able to do it.  This is a job for someone like a CAD manager, for example.  My personal opinion is that someone has to be the responsible party and "own" the ECO.  Just so happens that here.... that person is me.  Anything goes wrong, the buck stops here and I'm responsible.

No need for "ape rage".... 

[Neil_Cross]

You've only highlighted and reinforced my point, that's great news for you, but not necessarily for me, I'm CAD manager at a company with over 150 active CAD users with a way of working that long outlives the Vault... I don't particularly want to change the way this company works to suit a product like Vault.  In fact, I remember back in my reseller days being handed a document from Autodesk which promoted Vault by saying the customer doesn't have to change the way they work to suit Vault.  But that's irrelevant.

Moving forward, I haven't tested it as of yet, but if the person opening the ECOs needs to be the CA, doesn't that mean they'll get email notification at every stage of the ECO process? Basically what I was looking to set up was a system whereby an ECO is approved by lead principal engineers, and they are prompted to do so via email notification.  If they're being spammed with emails at every stage of the process, and there's no way to modify the template, a lot of these emails could easily be ignored.  Unless they apply an outlook filter of some sort.  Which again, shouldn't be necessary.

My overall point is it should be configurable enough to allow different companies to work the way they want to.

[cbenner]

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@neil.cross wrote:

Moving forward, I haven't tested it as of yet, but if the person opening the ECOs needs to be the CA, doesn't that mean they'll get email notification at every stage of the ECO process? Basically what I was looking to set up was a system whereby an ECO is approved by lead principal engineers, and they are prompted to do so via email notification.  If they're being spammed with emails at every stage of the process, and there's no way to modify the template, a lot of these emails could easily be ignored.  Unless they apply an outlook filter of some sort.  Which again, shouldn't be necessary.

My overall point is it should be configurable enough to allow different companies to work the way they want to.

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I'm not sure I understand why you need the Requesting Engineer to be the Change Admin.  Because, yes... the CA gets all email notices.  You could set up a corp of CA's who are in charge of handling the Admin side of the ECO process, or just one if you prefer.  One thing I did notice, is that the Requesting Engineer is not automatically the Approver.  That may be by design.  If ytou want them to be, the CA needs to add that role when they Submit to Work.  Normally, other than the CA and anyone set up a Notification User... folks will only get an email when an ECO enters a state that requires their attention.

So it just depends on how you want to set it up.  If you want each Requesting Engineer to be the Admin of their own ECO's... they're going to get every email.  Not pretty, but that's the way it goes.  With us being so small, we can get away with myself being the CA, and my boss as Notification User... just so he can keep an eye on things.