# Intent Management

ION's Intent Management lets your organization track, enforce, and propagate intent designations across parts, inventory, purchases, procedures and runs. Examples of intent designations include flight vs. non-flight, production vs. prototype, or any graded quality level your team uses.

{% hint style="info" %}
Contact your Manufacturing Success Manager to enable this feature for your organization.
{% endhint %}

## What Problems Does Intent Management Solve?

Without intent enforcement, teams must rely on manual processes to ensure that only the right-grade parts end up in critical assemblies. ION's intent management automates these checks by:

* Validating that inventory meets intent requirements when it is kitted or installed.
* Propagating intent automatically from purchase orders, runs, and issues.
* Blocking or downgrading intent assignments that would violate your quality policies.
* Requiring that users set intent at key workflow steps (run creation, step start, etc.).

## Navigating to Intent Settings

1. Navigate to **Settings** from the user icon at the bottom of the sidebar.
2. Select **Intent** from the left sidebar.
3. From this page you can configure all settings described below.

## Setting Up Intent Options

Before enabling enforcement policies, define your organization's intent options (e.g., Flight, Dev ...), and put them in the correct order.

### How Intent Options work

* Each option has a label (for example, Flight, Production, Development).
* Each option also has a rank.
* Lower rank means higher/stricter quality (rank 0 is most strict).
* This ranking is what settings like `requireKitIntentMatch` and `requireInstallIntentMatch` compare.

### Aliasing Intent

For various reasons, an organization may refer to Intent by a different name. Common alternatives include pedigree, quality level, and tier — driven by regulatory requirements or internal conventions.

ION's intent management supports this flexibility through the Intent Alias organization setting, which lets you define what your organization calls Intent within ION. The configured alias is used as the label wherever Intent appears in the UI.

{% hint style="info" %}
Regardless of the configured alias, the API field remains `intentOption`.
{% endhint %}

### Recommended setup flow

1. List your quality tiers from most strict to least strict.
2. Create each intent option.
3. Order them so strictest is first (lowest rank).
4. Verify the hierarchy with your quality/manufacturing owners.
5. Enable the relevant policy settings described in this guide.

### Example hierarchy

| Rank | Value               |
| ---- | ------------------- |
| 1    | Flight              |
| 2    | Critical Non-Flight |
| 3    | Development         |

{% hint style="warning" %}
If this order is wrong, enforcement behavior will be wrong (for example, allowing lower-grade inventory where it should be blocked).
{% endhint %}

## Quick Reference

* [Run Controls](/quality/intent-management/run-controls.md) — intent enforcement during run creation, step execution, and inspection runs
* [Inventory Controls](/quality/intent-management/inventory-controls.md) — intent enforcement during procurement, kitting, issue resolution, and manual inventory creation
* [Install Controls](/quality/intent-management/install-controls.md) — intent enforcement when inventory is installed into assemblies
* [Part Intent/Quality](/quality/intent-management/part-intent-quality.md) — enforcement based on the part's own intent rating


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