1. Using Product Development
  2. How Item Grade is Calculated

How Item Grade is Calculated

The Item Grade side tab displays the Item Grade page. The application computes a temporary grade for the item, using standard rules from the industry.

Documents or manufacturer parts don't support the Item Grade function.

Grade Items in Risky Conditions

Grading is computed for all the Items from the entire item structure. It takes into account certain risk conditions of the item and its structure to compute the grade. Risky conditions that merit attention and modification may include the following:

  • A child item at leaf node that has no approved manufacturers list (AML).

  • A child item that has an unapproved manufacturer part number (MPN).

  • A child item which is at a lower lifecycle than its immediate parent item or the structure's top-level item. For example, a bicycle wheel might be at the Production phase of its lifecycle, while the bicycle itself is still in Pre-production: because there are other subassemblies that aren't yet ready for Production, this is appropriate. You wouldn't want the bicycle to have achieved Production phase while its wheel is still in Design. The grade rule provides an alert on the bicycle's Details tile.

Default Rules

Grade computation can be configured to ignore or take into account any of the rules. You can select one to five of these issues to be involved in item grading:

  • Lifecycle Mismatch

  • Unapproved MPN

  • Inactive Items

  • Unreleased Items

  • No AML

Standards for Grading

These are the default grading standards. The application doesn't count all the instances of violations; it counts an issue or criteria as "1 issue" no matter how many times the issue is violated:

  • An item with 0 issues that has an Approved status is graded A.

  • An item with 1 issue is graded B.

  • An item with 2 issues is graded C.

  • An item with 3 issues is graded D.

It can also be configured to use numeric grading, so that the number 5 corresponds with the letter grade "A", 4 with "B", and so on.

Click an element on the Item Grade tab to discover what issues or conditions affect its grade.