Better Unit of Measure and Quantity support between Creo and Windchill

[kpritchard]

Auto-Associate and Building Part Structures from CAD works well when the models represent something that would have a BOM Unit of Measure of "EA" (each).  Please provide better support for non each quantities and Units of Measure.  Use cases include both Bulk Items and Geometry models.  The Bulk Template does seem to communicate BOM_REPORT_QUANTITY and Unit into the Uses of a WTPart Structure, but the Units of the CAD are limited (tried using feet from Creo and ended up with meters in Windchill).

Also need to be able to propagate non each Units and non unit Quantities for items such as Cable Trays, Tubing, Unistrut, Structural Sections etc..  It's a bit weighty to have to have a unit item of material length.  The Creo side of this is taken care of by flexible parts but there's now way (if there is please point me in the right direction) to get this information to propagate into the WTPart Structure.

This would allow full leveraging of the CAD as Owner Association and ensure accuracy and integrity in the relationship between the CAD model and PDM BOM. 

[bmr]

We added a second quantity and unit attribut. So we are able to add two tubes with a length:  2 x 0.3m Every CAD Model has the unit ech. If the user need to change the unit, then only the second one.

Or you can remove the occurences and change the units. But this needs a good know-how what you're doing. And for the most users not recommended ...

[slapha]

We found another difficulty if you use Product Structure driven by CAD, and then change the WTPart to "As Needed", now it's not synced with CAD and the product structure compare tool doesn't show 1 to 1 comparison. It shows a lone CAD part and a Lone WTPart. An annoyance more than anything if you're using it validate product structure or cad structure.

I've actually seen in other systems (Not windchill) where they had to make a special value that would never be used for quantity (.0001 if memory serves) to give it something to interpret as "as needed" because the system couldn't handle it and was added with customization.

How do you measure out required grease used in multiple spots? I always imagine if someone put 1 each, getting a tube or barrel of grease ordered for each time it's called out. "Why do we have 500 barrels of grease in stock?"  I doubt it would ever happen, but you never know how literal people can be.

[slapha]

This is also similar to product idea Bulk Item vs Regular Parts and integration with PDMLink

[kpritchard]

Can happen and does... 25,000 rolls of Teflon (thread sealing) Tape

[SvenR]

Yes that would be very useful.

I really wonder how people do when they have lots ob tube, profiles, or seals that are for example on a spool or as long bar stock and assemble cut parts of them in an assembly.

Of course one could create a seperate CAD model for each lenght but this really adds work and a mess of models instead of clarity. This would be really not helpful.