Embed Electronic Work Instructions in another system

Electronic Work Instructions can work side-by-side with another solution in the shop floor, such as a manufacturing execution system. This capability provides the user of the external solution direct viewing access to the manufacturing data from Electronic Work Instructions instead of needing to translate the data into other systems. Electronic Work Instructions can be:

• Embedded inside the other system’s window, as a small panel.

• Presented on a second screen.

For MES to navigate to a specific step, Electronic Work Instructions provides you with a runtime property that can be used to calculate the Electronic Work Instructions URL for a given step so that it can be viewed from the external system. The property is exported with the step in PLM XML and the external system can use it to launch that step in the embedded Electronic Work Instructions.

The URL is comprised of three parts:

Procedure

1. The domain and machine name that are read from the EWI_step_url_domain preference.

2. The internal ID (UID) of the collaboration context object or the top line.

3. The recoverable UID of the step object.

What to do next

To see the URL embedded in the external system, add embeddedLocationView=true as a parameter to the URL as follows:

http:// server-name:port-name /awc/?embeddedLocationView=true#com.siemens.splm.clientfx.tcui.xrt.showObject?

While the navigation of the steps happens in the MES, Electronic Work Instructions displays the relevant information required for each of the loaded steps. You can configure Electronic Work Instructions to show only the information that the customer needs (for example, only the instructions, only the graphics, graphics and instructions). In this way, the data displayed in Electronic Work Instructions complements the data shown in the MES system. So, for example, the shop floor user can work with the MES to navigate the steps and view the part list and instructions but view the relevant graphics in Electronic Work Instructions.

You can use the EWI_HiddenComponents preference to configure the display of the header and footer. You can also display all tabs in one main panel by setting the EWI_Layout preference value to SinglePanelLayout and then configuring which tabs are displayed by setting the EWI_SinglePanelLayout preference.