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Question

Changing "Released" CAD Data in PDMLink

Forum|Forum|14 years ago
January 23, 2012
35 replies
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Users, Abusers and Downtown Cruisers; I have two questions forthe users that are working with Pro/E and PDMLink. I am wondering if y'all are willing to share how your company handles these two scenarios in PDMLink:Non-Solid CAD Changes After Released: The models and drawing are at a RELEASED state, but there is something that needs to be changed or added in the 3D models. For example, you need to hide a Layer, add a Datum, fix a frozen or failing component's assembly constraint, add a Simp Rep, etc. We do not want to REVISE the model to bump it back to a state where it can be Checked Out, changed and Checked In. We are changing the model only, not the drawing. How are you handling this at your company? Make Minor Changes to A Drawing (or Model) During the Approval Process: The drawing is going through the process of being reviewed/approved. After ~10 people have reviewed it and approved it (Engineering, Manufacturing, Purchasing, etc.), one of the people in the process (Quality)finds a typo, or a layer that should have been hidden, or whatever. If the drawing is rejected, the review process has to start all over once it is fixed, causing a delay. How is your company handling this?Hopefully this is not too much of an "emotionally charged" issue for a Monday afternoon. Any input is appreciated! Thanks, Andy B.
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General

BenLoosli

23-Emerald III

Non-solid changes: Change is done by an administrator, or the state is changed and a trusted designer makes the change and state set back. If the change may change what is visible on the drawing at this level or higher, the part is revised.

Minor changes to drawing: Since we only have 3 levels of signoff, the package is rejected, revised and resubmitted.

Thank you,

Ben H. Loosli
USEC, INC.

DamianCastillo

1-Visitor

The scenario you just mentioned is a big issue for our company and probably many others. We have an SOP that says a Revision takes place when we change Form, Fit or Function of any Released product.

If you are adding a datum point to the model or correcting the spelling of a word in the drawing, it does not get a new Revision because the Form, Fit or Function was not affected.

Now, we are in the process of implementing Windchill 10 and this came up as one of my big issues with the way Windchill handles this. We can't use the "out of the box" setup for Revisions because it won't work for our company. I honestly don't see how any company would change their revision level for things like this but I know many do.

We came up with a custom revision scheme and a rule that allows us to accomplish this. Now this is all in theory and was tested during a demo, but we have not actually implemented Windchill yet. In the demo, it worked the way we needed it too with a draw back. The revision levels will have a letter and number such as this. A, A1, A2, A3, B, B1, B2, etc.

The letter is the Revision level and the number is the minor iterration. We are going to set up our system to automatically bumb up the minor iterration as you make changes and check them back into the system. If we need to make a real revision change to a released product, we can check it out, make the changes and then manually bump it to the B level which will be restricted to an Administrator.

The downside to this is that it's a manual decision that a human must make and they could potentially forget to request the Revision bump up. We have to play with this idea and maybe come up with a process of approval for all things checked into the system. Maybe this way we can catch when a real revision took place and have the admin. bump it up to B. Once it's in the system as B, all check out and check in would do is bump up the number to B1, B2, etc. Again, when a real revision is made, we need to manually bump it to C and repeat the process.

It's not perfect and I can't even tell you if it actuall works at this stage, but this is our plan.

If anyone has a better idea on how to handle this, please let me know. The idea of changing a revision just because you added a datum point to a released product is ridiculous to me. The Revision is a big deal for our products and they are visible to the customer. We can't just change it for things that don't affect Form, Fit or Function.

Thanks

"Too many people walk around like Clark Kent, because they don't realize they can Fly like Superman"

ptc-1932745

1-Visitor

Just my $.02...

I think that in your case 'Just adding a datum point' IS affecting
F-F-F. Going to say, a datum that is specified as the full part face,
and then changing it to three datum points would require a revision.
Especially because you need to know that downstream suppliers are using
the product revision that you specify.

Unfortunately, deciding when to issue drawing revisions is similar to
being a 'little bit pregnant'. Typos, etc... are embarrassing to have
to issue a drawing rev for, but in the strictest sense, required.

There was a thread some years ago about creating all kinds of work
arounds when you have to change a BOM on an assembly drawing without
having to issue a rev for the parts in the BOM in order to add a
parameter that would not affect F-F-F. If you were still using a
paper-based system, changing the assembly drawing would be the end of
it, but in the digital realm, needing to add a parameter to a part file
creates a rev of the parts as well as the assembly.

In my experience, you need a way to issue an interim change notice to be
attached to the documents as a supplement. I have had Aerospace
customers do this as an 'ADCN' or Advanced Document Change Notice. This
way they could make small revisions/clarifications to the document
without creating a full revision. At some point in time, all of these
ADCN's would roll up to create a revision, but on older projects where
there was no labor available to incorporate the change formally to the
drawing, this could take years.

I suggest that you use the strictest definition of the revision
workflow. It may be painful in the short term, but will enforce a
thorough checking of the designs in the future.

Christopher F. Gosnell

FPD Company

124 Hidden Valley Road

McMurray, PA 15317

davehaigh

13-Aquamarine

Chris,
I'm pretty sure your confusing ProE datums with Y14.5 datums. There are a lot of times you need to go back after part or assembly is released and add additional datum features so it can be assembled differently for another assembly. Or you may want to turn off some layers in the model and save the layer status. Or you might even want to just change the color of the part or some surfaces on the part. None of which affects the form, fit, or function. As long as the topology of the part isn't changing and you're not changing the Y14.5 datum definition your ok.

One of our divisions here allows the model files to have different release levels from the drawing specifically for these types of changes.

David Haigh

DamianCastillo

1-Visitor

Adding a datum point or datum plane does not always change the F-F-F. Our products are not tied to a digital feature that is added to a 3d Model. Out product is tied to a released history that the customer is familiar with.

We have some Released assemblies that we want to add a datum point too, for no other reason than to constrain things differently for an overlay report for internal use. This datum point is not affecting anything realted to F-F-F.

Our products have external revision letters that are not only visible to the customer but very important to the customer. If we have to make an improvement to a product due to some issues with the current design, the revision letter on the new products is what the customer looks at to make sure they received the newer design. They may need to send back the inventory of the current revision level back to us. Let's say this new design is working great. The customer is aware of the revision level of the design they are using and are happy with the results. We can't change the external revision level just because we added some datum point to the model. This datum point does not affect the product the customer is currently using and we are not going to spend the money making brand new tooling to change a letter from B to C on the product.

It makes no sense for us to ever change a revision level just because we added some insignificant change to the model or drawing. If it does not change it's F-F-F, it should not get a revision. If we desided to change the color of our models for all our catalogs because we think the current color does not print as well, I am NOT going to update the revision level of the model, drawing, tooling and product for this chagne. It's ridiculous.

I am sure there is a solution out there to make systems like Windchill work more intelligently than it does today. Accepting a flaw in flexibility with a system is not something we should have to swallow. If software is not felxible enough to handle real world situations like this, we should not simply accept it as a good practice when it's clearly not.

Just my opinion.

"Too many people walk around like Clark Kent, because they don't realize they can Fly like Superman"

ptc-1932745

1-Visitor

My $.02 more ($.04 total),

I agree that in the cases you highlight, you would not be making changes
to a paper based system, but that is not what Windchill is meant for.

We had a similar situation for our engineering documents, we decided
that our paper drawings are our 'bible' and the 3D models that support
these drawings are not, and do not need to be controlled by revision.
We rev control the pdf's of the drawings, but not the models and
assemblies. We do not use Interlink or Windchill for this reason.

Whether we like it or not, systems like PDM in general and Windchill in
particular will drive us to use model-based definitions. Unless we
start drawing again in 2D, the drawing will always need a model of some
kind to be the 'parent'. There are workarounds such as the ADCN method
I described earlier, but I don't foresee Windchill being a system where
the drawings are rev controlled, but the part models are not, or a
system where the drawings are the parent of the part models.

If you need to add a datum point for an internal inspection, or 'tweak'
the part color or texture for a catalog, I suggest that the only way to
do this without revising the part model in question is to create a new
model, and incorporate the original part model features using something
like inheritance. Then you can take this new model and add features
like extra datum points or colors and textures without revising the
parent.

Please let me (and the group) know what your final decision becomes,
these are some of the issues that cause us not to implement systems like
Interlink, or Windchill.

Christopher F. Gosnell

FPD Company

124 Hidden Valley Road

McMurray, PA 15317

DamianCastillo

1-Visitor

Chris,

Thanks again for sharing your perspective.

I personally believe that the lack of flexibility or options on how revisions are controlled in Windchill is a limitation to the software. We should not let a limitation to the software drive common sense.

Tthe reality is that sometimes companies must add things to the 3D model that have no affect on the actual product's design or current revision level. The limitation of Windchill not having some intuitive mechanisim to address this is a falt of the software and not the practice that companies have used for revision control.

Windchill is supposed to help protect our data and our designs while preventing errors. If this comes at a cost of forcing companies to change the how revisions are controlled, I think there is major room for improvement with the software. Changing a $10,000 tool to add a new revision letter for simply adding a digital feature that has nothing to do with the products purpose is not acceptable. Confusing the customer on what product inventory they actually have by giving them multiple revisions that are 100% identical is not acceptable. Not allowing the customer to clearly understand what products were actually improved by a new revisions letter is not acceptable.

Thanks again for everyones input. I only hope PTC is listening and can figure out a way to add the flexibility required by many companies.

"Too many people walk around like Clark Kent, because they don't realize they can Fly like Superman"

ptc-593619

1-Visitor

I only hope PTC is listening and can figure out a way to add the
flexibility required by many companies

Either that or maybe a third party can supply something that the users
want and/or need rather than a "one size fits all" with a "take it or
leave it" attitude?

Richard A. Black

Lead Design Engineer

Eaton Corporation

440 Murray Hill Road

Southern Pines

NC 28387 USA

TimKnier

1-Visitor

I think one question everyone has to ask themselves is, can you trust your users? Even though we're not on Windchill, we have the same issue with our database manager. Opening your 3D models up for minor tweaks that wouldn't affect the drawings or overall design, also could open them up to inexperienced or unscrupulous users looking for a shortcut that could really make a mess of things. How do you prevent that? The software is trying to do that by locking things down. Take away the locks and you could have trouble. Fortunately our database manager does allow for some flexibility in this but there is still a danger.

Tim Knier
QG Product & Support Engineering
QuadTech
A Subsidiary of Quad/Graphics
Sussex, Wisconsin
414-566-7439 phone
-<">mailto:->
www.quadtechworld.com<">http://www.quadtechworld.com>

lylebeidler

1-Visitor

As a CAD admin/engineer for a company that may be "upgrading" from Intralink
3.4 to a Windchill solution this year, I've been following this discussion
with interest. It sounds like PTC abandoned the "Revision + Version"
paradigm in Intralink when it introduced Windchill. Is that the case? If
so, I'm with Chris - I think that was very shortsighted. The Version
handled things like adding datum points or CSO's very well; the fact that
the Version was automatically updated, where the Revision was a manual
decision, often based on Form, Fit, & Function, was a good idea. I don't
see why PTC abandoned this.

For us, to work around this, we may simply add a text parameter to our
models, call it, say "MGS_REV" and use that in place of the Revision
parameter in Intralink. We'll just have to update it manually. For those
of you who've already made the jump, does this sound like a good idea?

--

Lyle Beidler
MGS Inc
178 Muddy Creek Church Rd
Denver PA 17517
717-336-7528
Fax 717-336-0514
<">mailto:-> -
<">http://www.mgsincorporated.com>

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