Figure 1: Product Data Management Framework
The following post is an excerpt from the white paper “Tech-Clarity Insight The Basics of Managing CAD – When Brute Force Fails and PDM is too Much” by Jim Brown. It discusses the requirements to gain control of your CAD data. To read the report in its entirety and find out what are these minimum requirements read the whole white paper here.
The most basic demand for data management is getting files under control. This helps prevent mistakes from using the wrong files, allows people to work concurrently without overwriting each other’s designs, ensures less time is wasted, and provides higher confidence in having the right data. “We need to work in parallel, but if we are both working on different parts of an assembly file structure I don’t want to wait for him to finish,” explains Tim Higgins of HemoSonics. It’s critical to have a file locking mechanism so engineers don’t accidentally overwrite files and lose work, or work on the same file concurrently and waste time having to reconcile changes.
It’s critical to have a file locking mechanism so engineers don’t accidentally overwrite files and lose work, or work on the same file concurrently.
It’s also crucial to manage versions and track design history. The CAD data management solution needs to be able to use history to step back to previous versions while maintaining the integrity of assemblies. “We have to manage revisions and track history,” says HemoSonics’ Andy Homyk. “If we develop something that doesn’t work we can step back. With different features in the CAD file we can’t just make a change and go back or we might delete references or features, it’s difficult to control the outcome. We have to be able to step back to previous revisions.”
The key requirements to support the Control sub-process are:
• Centralization – ensures that everyone works from the same data
• Versions and Revisions – marks points in time in design and retains history
• File Locking – allows people to safely work concurrently
• Rollback – enables engineers to automatically reinstate previous versions of files and assemblies
Additional features that go beyond the basics include configuration management (CM), BOM Management, and visual version comparisons. These are desirable features if they are available.
For more information on controlling CAD files in a file management, download the rest of Jim Brown’s white paper.