Using Life Cycle Transitions

The Transitions tab appears when creating or editing a life cycle template.
You can use transitions to define paths from the selected state to any other
state within the life cycle template.
Phase Transitions

Using a set of transition rules, you can define appropriate sets of business
processes for the stage of development for an object. For example, the
processes for developing a part can be informal in the early stages of
development, but will require more formal processes if the part is introduced
into production.

Using transition rules, you can set up a variety of business processes to be

available for each type of object in a Windchill PDMLink system.

The following diagram is an example of how these rules can be applied to a

life cycle.

Some business practices require more formal processes, such as review and
approval cycles. The Promotion and Change transition rules have associated
workflows for that purpose. By default, the promotion transition rule has two
workflow processes defined. Depending on your business practices, zero or
more workflow processes can be configured for use with a specific promotion
process.
For some promotion review processes, it is important to freeze or lock the
promotion objects, so that no changes are made during the review process.
For the example life cycle above, the lock transition can be added to set the
objects to the Under Review state during a promotion process.

For change management processes, the new life cycle state for approved
change notice is now defined by the Change transition and is no longer fixed
to one specific life cycle state.

These transition rules are defined for each life cycle.

Transition rules may also identify whether the objects are locked during
Promotion reviews. The object resides temporarily in the locked state while
the promotion process executes. If a lock transition is defined for a particular
state and an object using the life cycle is designated for promotion on a
promotion request, the workflow of the promotion request sets the state of
the object into the state identified with the lock transition.

Suppose your life cycle model looked like this:

You determine that you want to establish transition rules: