Site Part functionality in Dovetail Agent
Dovetail Agent includes functionality for maintaining your Site Parts (sometimes referred to as Installed Parts). Site Parts are parts that have actually been installed at a site.
Users can install, de-install, re-install, and edit site parts.
View Site Parts for a site
On the site page, there is a Site Parts tab that shows all of the site parts that are installed at this site.
Notice that site parts are shown hierarchically , as site parts can be installed under site parts.
Also notice that the hierarchy shows Bins, which are containers for parts and for other bins. Bins are useful for organizing parts at a site.
View De-installed site parts
Clicking the Show De-Installed Parts checkbox will also show the parts that have been de-installed.
This allows you to re-install a de-installed part.
View a Site Part
Clicking on a site parts (regardless if it’s in an Installed or De-Installed state) will navigate you to the Site Part page.
From here, users can:
- Edit the site part
- De-Install it (if it’s in an Installed state)
- Re-Install it (if it’s in a De-Installed state)
- Add or delete file attachments
- See the contracts that cover this site part
- View its history (activity log)
Installing a part
Clicking the + button on the Site Parts tab header allows a user to install a part at this site.
We use our standard picker for selecting a part.
Both serialized and quantity-tracked parts are supported.
Install Location
Notice that on the right side of the page, you can pick where a part is installed to:
at the site:
under another part:
or in a bin:
When installing a part, the Part Domain rules are enforced. These include:
- If a part may only be installed directly at the site
- If a part may only be installed under another part
- Enforce unique serialization – for all items, for each item, for each site
BOMs
Installing BOMs is also supported.
When creating part numbers, you also can choose to create bills of materials (BOMs). BOMs define the component parts of a product. In some cases, the component parts in a BOM are not sold separately.
For example, I have a part names cool software pack, which has 3 BOM parts:
Installing this 1 cool software pack at the site installs all 3 of the BOM parts under it automatically:
Privileges
As you may not want everyone in your organization maintaining site parts, all of the actions are privilege class controlled. There are privileges for:
- Edit Site Part
- Install Site Part
- De-Install Site Part
- Re-Install Site Part
All of these are managed using the Privilege Classes UI within Dovetail Admin. This gives you fine-grain control over who can do what in the system.
Not supported (yet)
There are a few things we skipped for now.
- creating/updating/deleting bins.
- selecting parts from a catalog (although we think the part picker makes finding the correct part a lot easier)
- move a site part from one site to another
Should the need arise as part of an implementation, we’ll revisit these features.
Summary
Maintaining your installed base of parts is an important aspect for many organizations that use Clarify/Dovetail.
While we’ve brought this core functionality into Dovetail Agent 5, we’ve also tried to streamline the workflow and make it simpler and more intuitive.
Hope you find it useful.
Rock on.
