Altium 365 Onboarding Process

The onboarding process is an intentional and personalized method of implementing Altium 365 into your day-to-day operations. This document outlines the process, explains the benefits of an Altium 365 onboarding and what you can expect throughout the process.

What’s Provided With Your Personalized Onboarding

Personalized onboarding with a Customer Success Manager (CSM) ensures you get the best start toward your successful adoption of Altium 365. The topics below are covered:

• Discovery Call*
  • Uncover desired outcomes and goals
  • Determine needs, expectations and implementation timeframes.
• Customized Onboarding Plan and Success Milestones
• Initial Onboarding Session*
• Follow-up Training Sessions
• Technical Assistance As Required

Discovery Call

This call usually takes place soon after you purchase access to Altium software and the Altium 365 platform. A CSM is assigned to your account to help guide you through the onboarding process. The focus of this call is to make introductions, determine the goals you have with Altium 365, start to formulate a customized onboarding plan and key milestones of success, and schedule the initial onboarding session.

Customized Onboarding Plan and Success Milestones

During the Discovery Call, the CSM will help identify the main areas of Altium 365 your company plans to utilize and implement. Based on these areas of importance, the CSM will formulate an onboarding session that discusses and demonstrates these same areas. They will also identify and set key milestones as benchmarks for successful adoption of Altium 365.

Initial Onboarding Session

This is the first training session and onboarding covering the topics discussed in your Discovery Call. Generally held via Zoom this session allows you to invite your team members, managers and other key stakeholders.

During the onboarding session, the CSM will demonstrate the areas discussed during the Discovery Call, answer questions and explain how these tools can be used to enhance your design process to be more effective.

The following is a list of topics that are commonly discussed during the initial onboarding session:

• How to connect to your Altium 365 Workspace; from within Altium Designer and through your browser.
• User Management – inviting team members to your Workspace, the importance of user Groups and configuring your Groups, and sharing designs to non-team members for collaboration, review and feedback. Along with Group support, we can discuss permissions and how these are managed.
• Component Management – creating your components, taking advantage of Octopart and the Manufacturer Part Search panel to save considerable time adding and migrating components to your Workspace.
• Project Management – creating projects from within Altium Designer and making them available on your Altium 365 Workspace, sharing the design and inviting team members to collaborate with you. Sharing the design with internal and external stakeholders for review, approval and release directly from Altium Designer and Altium 365.
• Templates and Design Reuse – setting up and managing templates, component templates, managed sheets, output jobs, and more.
• Lifecycles and Revision Naming – Lifecycles and Revision Naming help identify the current state of items along with which revision is currently deployed or in progress. We will discuss different lifecycles and how to configure and use them.
• Version Control – utilizing the built-in version control system of your Altium 365 Workspace.
• MCAD Co-Designer – using the built-in tools and add-ons to utilize real-time synchronization with your Mechanical Engineering teams.

Follow-up Training Sessions

As you can see, a large amount of content is covered in the initial onboarding session. It may be helpful to have follow-up training sessions with team members that are responsible for specific areas and tasks related to Altium 365. Some tools and features require more in-depth knowledge than a general user may need to know. Your CSM will reserve time for these additional sessions, as needed.

Some common topics that may require a separate session are:

• MCAD Co-Designer – an in-depth discussion and review of the MCAD Co-Designer and how to setup, use and manage this system. With a real-time synchronization and commenting system, this tool can greatly reduce your lag time between updates on either side of your design process.
• Template Configurations – from Component Templates to Project Templates, and everything in between, we will help you to setup your templates specific to your organization based on your design processes.
• Component Management – from Part Requests to Component Creation and Release, we will discuss every aspect of your component management process. Whether this is managed by a single librarian or a team of engineers, we can share tips, tricks and suggestions to make component management easy. We explain how Accuris® Parts Intelligence can make finding alternative parts easier, even in the middle of generating purchase orders, using ActiveBOM.
• Manufacturing Release Processes

Technical Assistance

During the onboarding process, your CSM is available for technical assistance and once your onboarding is complete, you will have all the resources to find additional help, if needed. These resources include Documentation, Altium Academy and On-Demand videos, and priority LiveChat support.

Outcome and Conclusion

Once your onboarding process is complete, your CSM will have helped you identify and begun implementation of the areas in which Altium 365 can be immediately beneficial to your organization. This is known as your Desired Outcome. The results being the indicated milestones are tracked and successfully completed. This desired outcome would indicate that your organization has successfully implemented and adopted Altium 365 into your organization and processes. Also, your CSM will continue to keep track of your milestones and goals. If there are additional features or improvements that may directly impact your organization’s success, they will contact you in order to share these latest updates. They are your advocate to success when it comes to Altium 365.  You may also be contacted to complete a short survey and provide feedback about your onboarding experience.