The company I work for has been using Pro/E and Intralink for ages and somewhere way back in time (around a decade ago) a series of nested family tables were made for screw, nuts, bolts, etc. The tables were not the ones that PTC provided, these were built from the ground up by other employees. Over time, these tables have grown to enormous proportions and a slowly crumbling. Poor control over CS has allowed people to go back and delete instances from the table...instances which were used as generics for later tables. The end result is that we now have a massive mess on our hands.
Just as a bit of trivia, there over 2000 family "trees" with over 40 "branches" spread amongst them (not counting past versions which will need to be addressed to find the lost branching children). In total, I am looking at having to work with over 30000 files to get this sorted out and fixed.
I have considered breaking the family tables completely and replacing all of the instances and generics with stand-alone models.
What I want to know is: has anyone out there worked with any of the outsourcing groups like Fishbowl to fix their family table nightmares and how did it work out? Was it worth it to have someone else deal with the headache or would you have been better off doing it yourself?
