Creo and Windchill Best Practices

The first and best practice I would note would be for everyone using Creo to have a PTC.com account. There is a tremendous amount of material available on PTC's website and I often reference specific topics in the Help Centers (https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/help/help.jsp). A PTC.com account is also required to open a case with technical support.

As a reminder, I prefix many of theBest Practice distributions with the following:
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Many of these on-line presentations require registration or a free PTC.com account to view. If you do not already have a PTC.com account you will need to “Create anAccount”http://www.ptc.com/common/account/index.htm.
Be sure to use your work email address and referenceyour company's Service Contract Number (SCN). Your company's Service Contract Numbercan be found in the Creo information window displayed by File / Help / System Information.
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Cam,

I can’t speak to Creo specifically (we are still stuck on Wildfire 5), but there are a few CAD/PDM practices I try to encourage.

Workspaces
Workspaces/Caches can become corrupted over time. Try to get your users to delete their workspaces periodically and create new ones. It will help cut down on some of the ‘weirdness’ that pops up from time to time.

The size of the workspace can affect response time when sorting/searching for parts. I encourage our users to limit the number of parts below 2000.

The part status column can also affect performance, particularly for large workspaces. It runs a script to check all of the parts and alerts the user if they are out of date.

Family Tables
Just in general, discourage your users from creating indentured (multi-level) Family Tables.

Check The Knowledgebase
As Marvin mentioned, there is a wealth of information available, not only for the users, but for you as well. There is at least one document that specifically deals with ProE/Windchill best practices. It details property settings that directly affect performance between the two systems. Some pertain directly to Windchill, while others are client-side settings you may want to push out to your users. I think you’ll find it in the documentation section of PTCs website.

Hope some of this helps!
Take care,
Steve

Hi,

I had similar problems with my users.

We created and enforced policy (this required, not only distribution of the policies but also train the users)

We also developed script to automate/simplify certain tasks.

For instance on Relation Parameters, we created what we called Embedded Parameter Creator. It was based on weblink and was an interface in the embedded webbrowser. What it did was to provide selection of parts we make and the list of parameters such parts had to have. Users could launch also the script when using existing parts, The tool highlighted if certain parameters or relations were missing/wrong according to the part opened. It has helped a lot with data cleansing (we do a lot of Save As)

You can also force the users by a WC setting to remove from WS when data are checked in. But this may not be applicable for your users.

We also replaced the OOTB Regeneration buttons by our customer ones. As some of our models needed to be regenerated twice to get the green light (most users regenerated once and never checked the green light).

Generally from my experience, admin must fight on several areas, Policy but also system configuration so either policy is used automatically by the system (eg for us if parameters were missing you could not check in, or if Model Check returned certain types of error). And train the users, provide consolidation training. A lot is down to education.

For large assemblies, we trained the users to breakdown their top level assemblies in sub assemblies and used simplified reps

For workspaces, we also included Views to supposed to be good for the users while not taking too much resources.

We also set a preference so by default only the new/modified/checked out objects are displayed rather than all. This is the As Featured Objects

Generally, best practices is down to how you want to use the system.

hope this helps. don't hesitate to ask 🙂