Upchain is a cloud-based Product Data Management (PDM) system where your team can collaborate seamlessly across the value chain. With Upchain you can easily access and edit critical product data, share it with relevant teams, track your assigned workload, and identify any product issues using dashboards and reports.
Projects are used to organize and manage the effort and data related to your product's lifecycle within Upchain. Projects enable you to track status updates and due dates while having all the information about a product, including a project plan, bill of materials, supporting documentation, and change history, all in one centralized location.
As a general rule, whenever you access or edit data in Upchain, you do so in the context of a project. You cannot begin working with Upchain until you have at least one active project.
A bill of materials (BOM) lists all assemblies, sub-assemblies, and parts that are needed to produce one unit of a finished product. Each finished product has its own bill of materials. Learn more about the different types of bills of materials in Upchain here.
An item represents one level in your bill of materials. It can be a part, assembly, sub-assembly, or end item (top-level, no parent). Use an item to manage all data associated with one object in a product design, including CAD models and drawings, translations, visualizations, markups, non-CAD documents, and metadata (attributes). Learn more about items here.
An activity is a basic unit of work that needs to be accomplished within a defined period of time. It enables you to clearly identify what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, and by whom. Activities can be stand-alone and created manually, or they can be part of a workflow. Learn more about project activities here.
In Upchain, a file refers specifically to a CAD model, drawing, or translation file. These files are generated by CAD software and managed within the item's details pane > Documents tab > Specification documents section.
In Upchain, documents are files that are not the main CAD models, drawings, or translations managed within the bill of materials. Documents in Upchain can be any file type that provide supporting information for the project, bill of materials, or items. They are a way to share and collaborate on content. You can organize documents into folders, preview, download, check them out, and a lot more. Learn more about documents here.
A workflow is the series of steps and processes that govern the lifecycle of an object in Upchain, such as an item, document, activity, or the project itself. More information about workflows is available here.
A team is a set of people in your organization who collaborate on projects with each other. If you are a member of an organization, you can easily find a list of its team members, or access the resource calendar. Learn more about teams here.