OK, hear me out.
We went down the path of using a downstream "view" from our upstream Design view on the same part type of Engineering Part. We ran into a bunch of problems.
- COTS and Standard parts don't revise and should not have a downstream view. They are already in the manufacturing view. So we found them all and switched them to a new soft type of wtPart and set the view to manufacturing.
- Building manufacturing from previous revisions of the engineering part that are not interchangeable (I know, it's bad practice). This was a mess in BOM Transformer as the tool assumes all previous upstream are equivalent to all downstream.
- Variances. We need our manufacturing to move ahead of engineering often, to do that they need to revise the manufacturing view of the part. This created a bunch of hurdles.
So, that brings us to the idea of using New downstream Part and having that part be a different soft type from the upstream Engineering part. Using a Manufacturing part allows us to create a branch that is not connected to the interchangeability issues we have as we can create more New downstream part branches as needed.
We can also create views off that downstream manufacturing part as needed for the nuance of manufacturing locations.
One issue is that BOM Transformer does not seem set up to do this.
Even when we have set the new Manufacturing part to be only created in the manufacturing view, BOM Transformer what's to use the Engineering view and you cannot change it in the action for new downstream part.
The other issue is Duplicate with Propagate creates the child downstream items in the Engineering wtPart type and not the selected parent Manufacturing type. Hassel to create each one at a time (why use BOM Transformer)
Anyone use a different downstream wtPart type?
If so, how are you doing that?
