Reactions that fire on a single workflow step

Nexus PLM has been able to react to a workflow finishing for some time. It can now react to one step inside a workflow finishing.

The distinction matters more than it first appears. “When the design review step completes, notify manufacturing” is a different rule from “when the whole change order completes”. Wait for the whole workflow and the notification arrives too late to be useful.

Both filters are mandatory. A step-level reaction has to name the workflow and the step within it. That is deliberate. A reaction bound to a step name alone would fire on any workflow that happened to reuse that name — exactly the kind of surprise that destroys trust in automation.

The Data Model designer picks these with a cascading selector: choose the workflow, then choose from that workflow’s actual steps. The pair is always valid because you cannot express an invalid one.

Alongside it, workflow definitions became administrator-only to write. Running a workflow and changing what a workflow does are different privileges, and they are now treated that way.