Hi Cho,
Xstep means Execution steps that has to be followed for your Production.
"Implementing Process Instruction is a tedious process":
Its very tedious job to create and maintain Process Instruction and you need to decide on Process Instruction characteristics which is really tedious.And user also need to know the syntax for Process Instruction characteristics. And moreover copying the Process Instruction characteristics from one phase to other, you have to maintain complete set of data again.
Xstep advantages:
Basically Xstep are used to generate PI Sheet. You can create an execution step which shall be stored in Xstep repository.
You can assign these Xstep either in your Master Recipe or directly to the Process Order.
Xsteps are usually used if you want to generate PI Sheet with different functionalities for different Product.
Xstep definition and generation of PI Sheet are less complex than configuring the PI Sheet. In XSteps you can implement functionalities with drag and drop. It's easy for the user to create and Implement Xsteps. The templates crated in Xsteps are reusable.And time required to create and maintain Xsteps shall be reduced.
Disadvantages of Xteps:
Release Xsteps can not be changed.There was no possibility to find out if an SXS was referenced in master recipes or process orders.The possibility to export only the XStep tree and not complete SXS versions, SXS or XStep folders doesn’t be useful to distribute your SXS master data.
Hopefully this helps you to understand about Xsteps.
Regards,
Shyam