Stages V7.3 comes with innovative features to support complex product development processes. Project and program processes can now be upgraded in flight. Already finished parts remain unchanged. This allows multi-year programs - typical for automotive or aerospace industries - to always use the latest development processes without changing the past.

Modelers can design processes faster by using centralized element pools, for example for roles or tools. This improves process consistency and enables better collaboration across different business units.

The new version also further improves process usability. Usage statistics provide valuable insights how processes are being used and lead the way into quantitative process improvement.

Product Development Processes, etc.

If you have a standard set of roles or tools you would like to use throughout all of your processes, …

Make templates, checklists, and other material directly available at activities, work products, or roles.

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Popular process elements of each user are now shown on the landing page. This allows quick access to frequently used parts of the process content.

For process managers, more detailed access statistics are shown in the Management menu. This enables you to determine which parts of the process content are highly used and therefore focus process optimization on those areas.

Classifying workspaces, e.g. for projects, products, product lines, etc.

Automating role assignments, data export, etc.

A new link in the left side navigation now always points to the Stages online documentation. It can be configured to also point to customer-specific help content.

Processes can now also be copied. A process copy is completely independent of its original, so all element identities, module relationships, and overwrites are reset in the copied version.

A ZIP file with exported process content can now be directly imported into an empty workspace.

Configuration variable properties can now be managed in the conf/config.properties and conf/secret.properties files in Java property format and used in config.xml and other xml config files. The secret.properties is not contained in the pks runtime info, so it can be used to securely store passwords and other access credentials that should never leave an organization's network or the server.

server.xml