Within your Windchill solution, you have the choice of using a variety of out-of-the-box life cycle templates to help manage the life cycle of parts, documents, CAD documents, and dynamic documents. You can also create your own life cycle template or modify one of the existing templates. The options available to you range from the ability to fully automate the process of promoting a business object through maturity levels with the use of workflow processes to providing manual transition process where users in specified roles can promote objects to new states explicitly through the promote action. Default life cycle templates are established for object types through the use of object initialization rules and a default set of Site rules is loaded during the installation process.

For more information, see Object Initialization Rules and Life Cycle Management.