1. Describe your environment: What is your industry? What is your role in your organization? Describe your stakeholders.
Electrical Energy Sector, designing low-voltage switchgear. Product Design Engineer. Large construction firms, Direct Network Operators.
2. What version of Creo Parametric are you currently running?
6.0.6.0
3. Describe the problem you are trying to solve. Please include detailed documentation such as screenshots, images or video.
Picture a scenario. I have inherited an assembly with hundreds of components, and 70 of them are fixings. I want to tidy up my model tree, and improve the workability of the assembly. I try to group together a stack of fixings (a bolt, a washer, a second washer, a locking washer, and a nut) which are all related to the same fixing point. I select these components and click on 'group'. A pop-up appears "Do you want to group another thirty components that happen to be in between these fixings?" "No" says I. Creo cancels the group function because all components have to be consecutive in the model tree for some bizarre and probably ancient reason. I try to find the components in the model tree and drag them to be next to one another, but in a sea of multiple hundred parts with similar or duplicate names this is impossible. I use the re-order command which takes about 10 clicks to get through, only to be given a non-specific error message. What benefit could this system possibly have over grouping components which are non-consecutive? Coming from Solidworks, I have learned that Creo utilizes the order of the model tree in a very strict way, but if I can drag all of the components together manually and group them, there is definitely no issue arising from the order of the parts when it comes to placement relations, so there should be no reason the group command can't drag the components together for me.
4. What is the use case for your organization?
Grouping parts
5. What business value would your suggestion represent for your organization?
Reducing the resentment I have toward this software and it's buggy /lazy/old programming which leads to silly errors when trying to complete basic actions; more productivity which otherwise goes wasted making repetitive and pointless commands, and writing up software improvement ideas for the most basic of actions, that will never be implemented.
