As organizations globalize and shift from a CAD-centric to a Part-centric approach, they find that many of the artifacts that have traditionally been included on the CAD drawing are better defined using the Enterprise Part or within other repositories. This holds particularly true for information related to environmental and regulatory compliance – failing to do so has frequently necessitated mass drawing updates due to differing standards in various regions of the world. Presenting BOM or variant information in a tabular format to supplement the geometric views is another common practice. Manually adding this type of information is both a time-consuming and error-prone drain on your organization. Fishbowl’s Director of Engineering, Ross Jessen, discussed how Fishbowl’s System Generated Drawing Automation has been used by many organizations to essentially “de-feature” their CAD drawings and automatically add this type of information to what becomes the final “Specification Document”. This includes the ability to gather information from a variety of sources (both inside and outside your PLM system) and create template based PDF's, that are overlaid or concatenated along with the CAD Drawing to produce a final document that can then be dynamically stamped along with applicable lifecycle and approval information.
