The overall publishing of a business object and its related objects to distribution targets that belong in a given ERP instance is represented as a transaction. Within this transaction, each of the related objects in the transaction, including the main object itself, is represented as a subtransaction. The object types covered by a subtransaction are part, part assembly (BOM), document, document link, Change Notice (CN), process plan, operation, sequence, resource, control characteristic and the associated quality link. Each subtransactions is stored as an object of type ReleaseActivity. Each ReleaseActivity is linked to the transaction in which it occurred and there is a separate Release Activity for each Windchill object published to a distribution target.

Each transaction stores the status of the overall transaction as: pending, processing, succeeded, or failed. The Release Activity objects store the status of the subtransactions as: pending, succeeded, or failed.