In my most recent contract, I’m working with a company called eSpline. They are one of the more established players in the VC consulting community. It’s funny, because I’ve met the people that run the company at the Configurator Work Group several times, but this is the first time our paths have crossed professionally. Anyway, back to my point… eSpline has a pretty handy little tool for performing a Health Check. It seems to be relatively new, but it has some powerful features. It’s called the Avenue Health Check Tool.
The idea behind it is that you dump a model (or group of models), kinda like a knowledge base, and then their tool goes through and figure out all the issues, warning and “less than best” practices. For example, it will detect “Zombie” characteristics in a class. This is anything that has no dependencies, tables or functions associated with it. Now there are multiple explanations for this, sometimes you need an information cstic to pass down to manufacturing, but there are no rules around it. Simply a selection made by order entry. Or, it could be a characteristic that a change was started, then rethought, and finally left there to hang out, forgotten in a sea of other characteristics. At least being able to simply identify these characteristics, gives the modeler an easy hit list to confirm or deny if there is a problem. Some of the other things that are really handy include flags to tell you if anything won’t transfer to the IPC. In a recent post, I talked about the long oss note for functionality that doesn’t work in the IPC, but does work in VC. The Health Check will quickly flag all of those items for you.
The health check is in an HTML type format, so it’s easy to jump to things that are connected, and even has some fancy images to show you how classes are connected, or BOM structures work. I was impressed by the features, so I wanted y’all to know about it. If you happen to check out their stuff, be sure to let them know I sent you. =)
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,
Mike