How Concepts, Concept Components, and Items Work Together

A concept ties together concept components, linked items, and assigned requirements in its structure, alongside its corresponding proposal.

Concept

A top-level concept root node contains concept components, linked items, and embedded concepts that let you incorporate concepts belonging to other users.

As you develop a product concept structure, you can search for, and link items, designs, and documents as concept structure line items, and as references in the concept and concept components metadata.

The design goal of a concept is a complete conversion to an item structure - Bill of Materials (BOM) - in Oracle.

Concept Component

Concept components in a concept structure are placeholders, and are meant to be replaced with links to existing or newly created items.

You can convert a concept component to an item when the component is ready to be processed further as an item in subsequent downstream applications. During the conversion process, preserve the created document and design relationships with the concept component as references. The newly created item includes reference metadata that links it to the source business object in Innovation Management.

When you choose to convert a concept component to an item and click the Convert to Item option in the Actions menu, remember that the change is immediate and automatically committed after successful conversion. You can't cancel the process. The new item link and other updates on the concept structure are also committed. This prevents accumulation of unused items in PLM and additionally maintains data integrity between Innovation Management and respective PLM applications such as Oracle Agile PLM, and Product Development.

Item

Existing applications that are currently supported by Innovation Management are Oracle Agile PLM, and Product Development.

You can convert an item to a concept component to suggest changes in its design attributes, or to reuse PLM data in your concept. The original item remains unchanged in the PLM application. During conversion, you can preserve the item structure, documents, and file attachments.