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Legacy Drawings and PDM/Works

We have PDM/Works here and I am beginning to get to the point where we are creating SolidWorks files of a part already in production here that is defined by an AutoCAD drawing. Once the part is created in SolidWorks, a drawing is created in SolidWorks and the rev number is one up from the AutoCAD drawing. I plan to check in the AutoCAD drawing into the vault along with the SolidWorks part and drawing - we don't just want ot trash the ACAD drawing as it is par tof the rev history. I plan to make add a reference between the SolidWorks drawing and ACAD drawing. Then I plan to put the SWX drawing in a released lifecycle and the ACAD drawing in a legacy life cylce with permissions set so that those outside of engineering don't see two drawings for the same part number. Only users in engineering would see the ACAD - or maybe just vault admin would see the ACAD file. But at the least, we would still preserve the history of the drawing and prevent others from viewing/printing the ACAD by mistake. How does everyone handle this. Is there a better solution for this that I am not aware of. Your help would be greatly appreciated.

Pete Yodis

Reply to
Pete Yodis
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I import the dwg file into solidworks and then check that in the vault at the current rev level. I then check it out creating the solidworks model and print and check it back in at the new rev level. I then archive the old dwg file to a cd. Now I have a record of the legacy history in the solidworks file.

I hope that made sense......

Noel

Reply to
N. Jones

Noel, I would have to import each DWG revision file into SolidWorks and then check them in one by one. We have 6,000 + DWG files that I need to get into PDM/Works vault using the bulk load functionality in PDM/Works 2004. Most of the 6,000 drawings have at least one rev, several have many. So, I would have to do your method maybe

12,000-18,000 times - unnaceptable. Would work if a user had limited numbers of ACAD drawings and revisios.

Reply to
Pete Yodis

You could load all the dwgs files into the vault using the bulk load, then as you revise the dwgs you could import them......I have about 12,000 give or take a few thousand drawings that are either hand drawings stored in a cabinet, various versions of Autocad, Mech Desktop, Inventor, and Solidworks. I would never try to load all of those into the vault (PDMworks or any other file manager for that matter) at one time....way too much room for trouble. Noble effort to try and get all of this in at one time but I think you will find that you are going to have to "touch" each and every one of these files in some way or another. I haven't used the bulk load tool yet but I would be curious to know at what rev level it checks these files into the vault initially.

Any way..........just some thoughts and ramblings

Reply to
N. Jones

"N. Jones" wrote in news:e4Lzb.345$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr11.news.prodigy.com:

Yes, I think that's the approach I would take. Use the bulk load to bring in the current versions only. Bulk load can assign every doc from the same folder the same rev level. It can also read data from attributes, so if the rev is in an attribute, you might be able to get it to read it automatically. If it's in the file name, well... you might want to change that.

If you have to manually change a lot of stuff, it might be most efficient to hire an intern.

matt.

Reply to
matt

I will be using the bulk load functionality to bulk load all of our drawings into the vault. I'm sure it may take a couple of days. Our AutoCAD drawings have many attributes, revision being one of them. Many thanks to the individual that set this up at my company long ago. I will be mapping the attributes in ACAD to file properties that will be written by PDM/Works. The file names are the part numbers, plain and simple, nothing attached. Our current PDM system stores files in folders - oldest to newest. I conversed with Joy Pineau, product manager for PDM/Works, when they were developing the bulk load functionality. I explained my situation, my concerns, and my wish list. I was impressed by what they were able to do. I have yet to try it yet, but from a private demo I saw on several of our own files, I believe it may work very well for us. As long as we load the earliest revs first, and then each rev next, the rev history is maintained just like any other in PDM/Works at least from what I have seen on the demo on our files. My question was really pertaining to how we would best preserve the rev history of the DWG file, "freeze" it at its last rev, not allow certain users to see two drawings for one part (very very bad), and proceed forward when pertinent with a SolidWorks model drawing of the part number. I thought lifecycles would be a key tool in this process, but wanted to hear if any one had any real world experience with these ideas yet, rather than just a theoretical "well maybe you could do" approach.

matt wrote in message news:...

Reply to
Pete Yodis

Greetings all,

I gave up years ago on storing older revisions of drawings. My experinece has been that it is seldom that anyone needs to go back to an older revision. The caveat to this is that your ECO process adequately captures the revision history so that if someone wanted to investigate the complete revision history of a part, they would be able to do so. So, if I were you, I would only concern myself with the latest revision. Once you get this stuff in the vault, PDMWorks will take of revs from that point on.

Reply to
B. Mendell

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