Assembly Family Tables

[joei24]

Hello

Does anyone have experience using Family tables to create different variations of Products?

TheProducts have about 30 or 40 components and Windchill is the datamanagement system.

WF4 is the Pro/E version

I have tried it in the past and had some issues with the family tables.

Can someone share their experience?

Thanks

Joe

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[ptc-810450]

I have tried using Family tables in Windchill for different variants of
products (though only 3 variants) and got into lots of trouble because
ProE/Windchill require the entire family table to be checked out if you
want to make a change to a single variant. This meant that my other
variants had to be upreved needlessly. Being a active implantable medical
device manufacturer, we have to submit any changes to the regulatory
authorities and so needless changes were too expensive. Having only a few
variants meant I split them into separate files. In our new product I will
try using the copied geometry method that was discussed a few months ago in
this forum. So far it seems to do what I want.

Regards,
--
Mark von Huben
Cochlear Ltd



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[jellis]

Joseph.....we use Family Tables for hardware type objects, screws,washers, etc. Although a Family Table could be used for Product Variations I'd be reluctant because the data management of these generics/instances can be a real headache in Windchill. We always edit/check in the complete family table for every edit to the generic/instance models.

Regards, Jim

[ptc-222962]

Hi Joseph,

We use family tables for everything and haven't had any issues. 100% of our components have at least one instance, most have between 4 and 8 instances, a few even go as high as 50 instances. We're running WF3 M120, Release 8.0 M040 of Windchill PDMLink. We heard many horror stories about family tables before we migrated to Windchill and that had us worried as we're a huge user of family tables, turns out everything was fine! If you have further questions feel free to e-mail me.

Regards,
Doug