Controlling drawing revisions

[Boggy]

Is there a best practice for the control of drawing revisions in WF? For example, let's say we have an assembly of 100 detail parts. Each part has its own drawing, as does the assembly. All the drawings are at Rev FR. We decide to make a change to Detail 25. If we just change the Detail 25 model, the existing drawing will change as will the assembly drawing. We could just change the drawing to Rev A, but then we would have no record of Rev FR. We could make a copy of Detail 25 and the associated drawing and make the changes to the copies. But then the change would not flow to the assembly. We could make a copy of the assembly, and then swap out the Rev A Detail 25 for the Rev FR. But this means that, over time, we will have a host of copies of a fairly large assembly. Plus, swapping out an internal component, that numerous other details could be referenced to, can also be time consuming.

Is there some common approach that folks out there are using that our small company is completely unaware of?

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[DanMarotta]

Alan, I moved your discussion into the Creo Elements/Pro (formerly Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire) community. You'll have a better chance of a response here.

Welcome to the community and great first post.

-Dan

[ChrisMcKee]

I have to assume from your description that you don't have any type of PLM system and that all your file storage is via Folder Structure.

Regardless - you need to retain a history. At a minmum I would suggest creating a Archive folder structure that matches your Released folder structure. Since your Drawing and Model files save with versions you can retain the history of the previous version (revision) in the Archive, but your Released folder will only contain the latest version - you can purge the rest (there are some tools available to do this - I've attached one that we use for any local work we do - you put it in the folder where you want to Purge and it removes all files other than the latest - so if you have versions 12 thru 32 in a folder it will only leave 32 after it is run).

It would be useful to have some type of database, if this is not an option at least a Spreadsheet where you can put in hyperlinks to the version associated with that particular revision.

The concept of the part that changes its drawing and the assembly and its drawing is handled in many different ways depending on the industry. Typcially if the part is changing to the point that the Assembly assembly and its drawing need to change to reflect the part change then the part change should likely be a new part - remember you have to be able to disposition forward and reverse - if the update can't be used on earlier builds than a new number is the proper solution.

Hope this helps.

Chris

[Boggy]

Chris,

Many thanks for the response. I should have noted that we are working in WF3 and using Intralink8 for file management. I would think that this would make revision control easier but our understanding of Intralink is pretty shallow and we have not been able to come up with an easily workable approach. I understand your suggestion to create archive folders and use earlier versions of the files in question to maintain a history. That would seem straightforward, and we did this to some extent before bringing in Intralink. It was very easy to move versions around, and ProE would reliably open whatever the latest version was in the active folder. Now that we have Intralink, the manipulation of earlier versions seems much less intuitive. We have opened earlier versions on occassion, but we have also run into problems with Intralink getting confused and/or refusing to check in a file because it was not the latest version. Because of this, we have been hesitant to use earlier versions for archiving purposes or to check on specific historical questions. Would you still recommend this approach with Intralink, or is there some capability of Intralink that addresses this subject?