This idea on the integration of Modeling and Model Manager is something i send to CoCreate in 2004. Reading product idea 1061 i thougt it might be useful to add it here as a product idea. We have a company wide multidisciplinary PLM system that is used for interdisciplinary communication and for the release process to the production departments. Besides that we need a database (lets call it Model Manager, MM) that is tightly integrated with the mechanical design tools (OneSpace designer modeling/Annotation). Part (article) structure is managed in the PLM system. The design structure is managed in ModelManager. In the design phase of a project the mechanical engineer only deals with ModelManager. This memo describes some of our ideas on the OneSpace Designer – Model Manager integration. The idea is that we need a kind of BOM in the design environment. However, it should be as simple as possible. We need something like masterdata to keep information like material etc. However we don’t want the extra overhead of masterdata structure. Lets look at this example This results in the following 3D model / masterdata structure A drawing of this assy should look like this What we would like to see here is not the 3D model structure, but the 3D instance structure! In fact, the masterdata of a button is a representation of one instance of the button. Another example: When I search the red button in Masterdata (154), I find that the 3D model 123 is related to it. When I load the 3D model of this red button, I get a button in a grey color (because that was the base color of the contents). However, when I inquire this button in OneSpace designer, this still leads to the red masterdata. Discussing about this behaviour the idea rose that the instance information of the color (RGBCOLOR x,x,x) should be passed to the masterdata in MM. When the 3D model of this masterdata is loaded, the color information should be passed back to the OneSpace Designer Modeling. This could be done also for an attribute like material. A material in the master data leads to a density in OneSpace Modeling. Why not map the masterdata and the instance information one-to-one? Don’t store the instance information in the owning assy, but store it as a separate object in MM. For design BOM purposes this instance structure would suffice. It could be one-to-one with the OneSpace Modeling instance structure. I don’t need to manage a separate masterdata structure.
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