How to handle the same model with different colors or materials in Windchill?

[mmathew]

How to handle the same model with different colors or materials in Windchill?

I have a creo model, say my_screw.asm in Windchill. And I need to manufacture a blue screw and red screw that has two different part numbers.

How do we handle such use cases using windchill? Or another similar use case could be change in material.. where the model from a design perspective is one, but from a manufacturing point of view there are two or more different parts.

Can somebody recommend a way to handle?

[LewisLawrence]

We manage this by having multiple WTParts associated (content) to the same CAD. Many physical attributes that don’t really need to be represented on the drawing are only on the WTPart, including material data and coating. As much as possible the CAD is just geometry, all the attribute and other data is managed on the WTPart. This really requires a bit of a step change for your organization in how engineering data is consumed, so may be difficult to implement.

Another approach that my work is to move material and coating information to the drawing, then have multiple drawings from the same model. Have to be careful about managing changes and make sure you treat everything a bit like one entity.

A final approach would be to use family tables for the different finishes, again you have to treat all the family table objects like one entity when making changes but in this case that is desirable (as they are really the same thing) so the usual problems typical when using family tables would not be as prevalent.

[GregoryPERASSO]

Since 10.2, you can use the same Method as Lewis, but with "owner" link.   eg. the multi owner link (one CAD to several WTpart)

So able to build automatically the WTparts, BOMs ... use the compare CAD to Part Tool to update in case of ambigiuous multi material case on occurrences ...

propagate attributes , BOM quantities, Creo View vizualization, etc ....

regards

Gregory

[Marco_Tosin]

Hi Gregory,

thanks to your suggestions (do you remember hidden preference on 10.1?), last year we started using multi owner link.

It works great to build structures but we are struggling with viewables and our consultants have scaled a call to R&D to have a solution.

They also talked to some Product manager last year in Nashville for the same reason.

See attached pictures (first is from details tab and second from structure/visualization).

They are from same object but, as you can see, in the second some components are missing.

In other cases some components are showed in their default coordinate system instead of the position they have in assembly.

Have you noticed same behavior?

[BenPerry]

I just wanted to throw in this link to the documentation quick.  Multi Owner for 10.2 M030.

Managing Multiple Windchill Part Structures Sharing the Same CAD Structure‌

[hvaradharajan-2]

Hi,

Interesting!...

Will it work with non-PTC CAD like SW, NX, Catia?

Or is that planned for Windchill 11.0 ?

Thanks

Hari

[BjoernRueegg]

As I understand this has nothing to do with Creo. These are normal PDMLink functions which are CAD independent. So it should also work with NX or Catia.

[hvaradharajan-2]

Hi all,

When I looked into the documentation on how to use multi owner link, I feel that it will be a nightmare for the users (who are not experts).

Is it worth? is a question that I like to ask,

Have companies started adopting this?

Some questions.,

Case 1:

Parent CAD Assy is not having 1:N relation to part.
But Child CAD part is having 1:N relation to part

In this case, will there be 1 Parent WTPart or many?

Case 2:

How will the colour of the resulting part structure - visualization adapt?

That is, how can we transfer the resulting part structure to have a colour representation based on the child parts.

Here Iam talking about using multi owner for parts that vary in colour only.

WIll visualization be adjusted to reflect the correct colour? (Based on attributes!)

Awaiting your valuable experiences!

Best Regards

Hari