collaborative or simultaneous engineering on part level

[GeorgW]

Hi Creo community,

I'd like to get your feedback or opinion on the topic "collaborative engineering on part level"

Note that we are using "classical" Creo & Windchill, no Creo+

Request from the users:  We want to execute simultaneous engineering on different areas of a part.

See my example:

• User-1 developing the outside design (or the design already exists)
• User-2 develops the green area
• User-3 develops the read area

Finally, the "zones" should be merged into one final part and MBD should be added

Personally I'd prefer a split of the grey part into Bodies and merge them back at the end (boolean operations), the other options could be inheritance or copy geom (surface...)

Your opinion on that?

BR 

Georg

[tbraxton]

Your use of multiple bodies would be a top-down method using multiple files. I am not sure that MBD information can be shared across parts, so test that first to see if it will work for you. Based on the example image of the starting model I would consider a top-down approach using a master model (grey box) and then using a skeleton model (may not be needed) and external copy geometry features (this could be parts from body) to deploy the constraints of the red and green areas for development by two users simultaneously. In this scenario you would end up with 3 models which must be combined to represent the complete grey box master.

For a single independent part file if that is the requirement then this is one option, but it is not easily managed unless you have expert Creo users.

I have worked on designs (before the top-down design tools were developed) where 2 or 3 Pro/E users have simultaneously developed features for the same part model. It requires planning, discipline, and a high level of proficiency among the users involved. We developed a method of getting the part with enough foundational features that it was then ready for multiple users to work on it. These foundational features served as the parental references available for new geometry to be built. These foundational features could not be changed by anyone except the lead engineer on the part. Each user would get a copy of the "master model" to work on from the lead engineer.  Each day all of the users would work on their part of the design and at the end of the day the lead engineer would work with the others to integrate the new features into the "master" model. The integration was done using the copy/paste special functionality to copy features from each user's model into the master. This worked well as all users knew how to manage the references within the model to support this process. The integration was manual and far from automatic, but we were able to reduce the time required to complete a part model versus only 1 person working on it.

[BH_12246893]

Is integration still a thing?  I had played with it decades ago and it worked well in demos and in very well controlled environments but seemed to fail when released in the wild.