Product design reviews

[KR_10497843]

We are an engineering company in the Northeast with offices in MA & VA. And we have suppliers in many states in the USA, and some outside. We have situations where we want engineers from our 2 offices, sometimes co-development partners and, more often, suppliers to review designs and provide written feedback and/or preliminary quotes or DFM issues. We do not want to open up our PLM system to anyone outside.

If you or your company have faced this issue and have implemented a solution, I would appreciate if you could share some details about your experiences.

Thanks
Kristin

[MikeLockwood]

The classic answer for this is to use a ProjectLink Project.

Have to pay for the licenses for it, but may be worth it.

Share the data to be reviewed to the Project (rather than Check Out to the Project).

Invite the supplier to the Project, in a Read-only Role.  Have to allow the supplier to access your Windchill system, but only the Project.

Alternatively, can set up such that the supplier can write to / create documents in a specific folder of the Project.

Build in a reminder to purge the Project team of users when it makes sense.  Can reassign Projectlink licenses at that time or sooner.

Note: The supplier can access all published CAD using Creo View.  If the supplier does not need native CAD files, then provide READ but not DOWNLOAD for EPMDocument type in the project, leaving only viewing in Creo View (Read, download for the DERIVEDIMAGE object type.

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A "poorman's" alternative to this is to create a Product or Library in PDMLink for this purpose, and move data to that place when it needs to be reviewed, then move back.  Set up that Product or Library with the Supplier(s) and give similar permissions, but only in that place.  May also need to give Read to fasteners in a standard parts library, but ideally using Creo View would be all that is needed - not native CAD.

Note: These external users can post in Discussion forums for all objects if given permission.  They can also create Creo View markups for comments, etc. if given permission.  This is not quite as elegant as ProjectLink but saves on licenses.

[KR_10497843 · Accepted solution]

Mike,

Thanks much for the info.

We do not feel comfortable allowing access to Windchill to outside vendors and suppliers. This approach is fine for the engineering folks in our other offices. Besides the license management (not to mention license expense) for PL Project that you recommend may be a little error-prone for our setting.

The poorman alternative does appeal to me somewhat mainly because it saves on PL licenses. Have to try it out with a couple of suppliers to see how bad the management burden will be. The moving of the data to and from our database to the 'external' repo sounds quite involved.

Thanks anyways for the hints.

Kris

[ScottMorris]

if you do not want to bring your external participants into Windchill, you can look at other solutions like COLAB. (https://www.colabsoftware.com/). this is a SaaS based application with a connection to Windchill that will let you publish selected content from Windchill to a collaborative workspace in COLAB. from there you can invite your internal and external participants to review models, drawings and documents, create markups, share a message thread and collect the feedback as tasks to be assigned and managed.

its a very compelling solution and sounds like a great fit for your need, definitely worth taking a look.