Hi All
I would like to pick your collective brains and knowledge but first some history.
We have been using SWX (2003 going to 2005 end of May) in conjunction with Smarteam since 1999, and after a few headaches we have got it down pat, but ONLY here in our UK design office. Bills of material to date have all been hand written then entered into SAP, so the structure of some of the models are not strictly correct i.e. hardware kits (screws, nuts, washers etc.) are put in the model at the level where they would be used in an assembly.
Now the company (US based) has implemented Global SWX/Gedas/SAP interface with little or no input from the experienced users here in the UK. The bills of material are now to be derived straight into SAP from the SWX assembly models. As you can maybe appreciate this is going to cause all sorts of problems with the likes of kits that are used to assemble the product, these usually get shipped in poly bags to the customer but we use all the kit parts in our models to verify the build, quantity etc.
One way I see to overcome this is to build the complete assembly model with all the hardware mated in the correct place, hide the sub assemblies then save what's left (should only be the hardware screws, etc.) as the kit number. When I save this model to Smarteam, it still picks up the hidden parts as part of the assembly, I suspect Gedas/SAP will do the same, not what I want. If I suppress the sub assemblies Smarteam does what I want and misses the suppressed parts (hope SAP does the same) but the downside going this way is I loose all the mates that are addressed by the suppressed sub assemblies.
Anybody got any better solution.
Cheers
Brian