For those who use PDF as a production drawing, do you keep revisions of these?

Sounds like a good way to do it. We are starting a "paperless" project here, to stop using paper travelers and drawings in our shop. Issues of making only the current drawings available are critical. We haven't decided on the file format yet. We're a job shop, so many of the drawings are from customers. We'll scan those, probably to tif, and then the SW and Acad files may get displayed as pdf or edrawings.

I like the approach of a vb program handling your file rev's and storage.

Thoughts or advice on going "paperless" from this group are very welcome.

Diego

Brian Putnam wrote:

We evolved from AutoCad to Solidworks here.

The AutoCad versions were saved with the revison at the end of the file name. (-RA)

We have converted all of the existing AutoCad drawings to PDFs and all new SolidWorks drawings are saved as PDFs also.

We have a hick-up.

We want our MRP/ERP software to have the ability to link to the PDF file and open Acrobat Reader for viewing. Therefore the drawing number entered in MRP/ERP database must be the same as the file number. In order to keep it simple we plan on taking the revision suffix off the PDFs and make sure our revisions are recorded throughly.

I'd ask yourself these questions:

How often do we need to access an old revision?

Do we stock parts under the revisons?

Is the lastest revision "backwards compatable? If not do we need to change the part number?

What ERP system do you use? We have Mapics, and are using some software that manfacturing calls "Paperless", which part of the program name, not the system. They have the same issue, the filename needs to be the same as our Item number.

Im going to ask about the wildcard. If the wildcard is ?.pdf, what if you have 123A.pdf and 123B.pdf?

This is the route I'd take. When a new revision is approved copy and rename the "active" revision to a older folder and append the revision to the filename.

Thus, the latest ERP link will always be to a specific path that contains the latest approved PDF (No file revision in filename). No need to modify the link each time a drawing is released to production.

Len

We keep the pdf files in our PDM system as well as the SolidWorks files. The pdf files all have the same name, no revisions, and you can find the old ones when you need to.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

We create a pdf of our SolidWorks drawings at ECO release. Our poilcy is that the SolidWorks Model, Drawing and the pdf must be at the same revision level at release. This makes it easy to tell what is approved for production. The last pdf is approved and the SolidWorks data with the matching revision level is approved. Any revisions beyond the pdf are not approved yet. We attach the pdf file to the solidWorks Drawing in our PDM vault so one appears below the other. The SolidWorks data is in an Engineering area of the vault that production can not view, The attached pdf actually resides in a foldered that production can has read access to. The ISO 9000 auditors love our system, it is easy to tell what to manufacture to and it is difficult for production to get to anything but the approved drawings. The other nice thing is that production has

Thanks for all the replies so far.

For those who dont put the revision in the PDF filename, how do you tell what revision the drawing is without opening it up?

If you used DBWorks PDM it would automatically create and control the PDF's so that the most current solidworks drawing would have a matching PDF guaranteed..

Is anyone using tif, edrawings, or a format other than pdf for production drawings?

We thought about doing eDrawings, but the PCs on the shop floor and some of our vendors and customers didn't have enough power on the to handle some of our large eDrawings.

Some of our customer's ISP mail servers wouldn't allow the large eDrawings through.

If you access the drawing from inside the PDM system, it shows you the revision, depending on how you get to the file. If you are just looking at the file itself, you have to open it. If we weren't using the PDM system, then I would be inclined to put the rev in the file name.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

Our current PDM system gets the revision from the revison custom property. Since PDF files dont have custom props, how does your PDM system handle this? Our PDM system does have "Versions", but these are not meant to be the revisions, just a version handled by the PDM system.

Our system (ProductCenter) has both versions and Revisions for all the files, including pdf files. Version is a system property and increments each time you check a file in. Revision is a property the user can manipulate, within limits. Since many people get confused by the two, we've started hiding the version from most users.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"