Best Practices for Document Types

[mdebower]

Anyone have any best practices for document types? Definition, organization, creation, attributes, etc...

We have an active project to update our documents and document types in Windchill and I haven't found a good way to corral close to 70 different kinds of documents into Windchill document types.

-marc

CAD / PLM Systems Manager

TriMark Corporation

[cc-2]

Hi Marc

are you talking about existing PDMLink document types or those 70 are outside PDMLink and you want to put them in PDMLink ?

If the later, then you are right to do a gap analysis and understand the technology.

The way we have decided on creating document types (document subtype) is the following

Do we need particular parameters ?

Do we need to control in a same location the permissions differently than other documents ?

Those were the 2 criteria that guided us to create our document subtype.

I will not say it is a best practice but it has worked for us, where we only have per document type the required parameters (so you do not have unwanted parameters for a particular document you want to create) and creating the permissions was very easy as we can propagate them top to bottom at the org level.

Hope this helps

Best regards

[BrianToussaint]

One thing we ask ourselves if we need to create a soft type document is if it needs to be routed for approvals. If it needs to be routed, then we setup a soft type for it along with a workflow. We have been moving our paper approval processes into Windchill and are using document soft types for this. Much easier than creating multiple change notice types.

Sincerely,

Brian Toussaint
Systems Administrator

Hoshizaki America, Inc.
"A Superior Degree Of Reliability"
618 Hwy. 74 S., Peachtree City, GA 30269