Hi Phil,
To be honest, the ECAD workgroup manager has been a serious pain to use. Short and direct answer: we are using it less and less.
Our environment is basically Windchill 8 M050.
The ECAD WGM has been very buggy in our opinion: it will occasionally create duplicate passive EPM links, or carry forward an older version of a passive EPM so now the user sees 2 versions connected to the latest part. It will sometimes fail to find the variant design parts, and therefore not revise them. This desynchronises the EPM links, leading to more failures. We had multiple tech support calls related to the ECAD WGM.
These cumulative experiences led to that design group being afraid to use the tool. Although to be fair, I don't believe we had very many errors related to the BOM data itself - suprising though, the amount of interaction required with text files to make this work.
Thus far, I've had my internal CAD support group write some info*engine tasks that basically take BOM data fed via excel, and create all the parent-child relationships (usagelinks) including all the reference designators (occurrencelinks).
(Note that manually using Product Structure Explorer is a non-starter to try dealing with reference designators, as these could easily number in the hundreds with ECAD designs).
The users are much happier now: they manage their CAD designs as regular documents linked to parts, and their BOMs are loaded via excel file.
