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Request for Lesson's learned on adding over a million parts to Windchill 9.1

jeffruff
4-Participant

Request for Lesson's learned on adding over a million parts to Windchill 9.1

We are bringing another business into the Windchill fold. This business has over a million parts to be loaded, and I am interested if anyone has any experience with loading this many parts what worked well and what did not work. Example, I would suspect that placing all parts into one folder is probably not a good thing, but what are the guidlines for number of objects in a folder? I would expect that searching would be negatively impacted and that we should look into indexing, but has anyone any experience to support his?


I am also interested in hearing about any other thoughs and experiences.


Thanks in advance for you assistance.

6 REPLIES 6
MikeLockwood
22-Sapphire I
(To:jeffruff)

This is where you earn the big bucks they pay you... 🙂

We may have similar coming up from two acquisitions - interested in what you learn.

Of all the various mass loads, WTParts are one of the easiest especially if you don't have to load structure. A lot of the "gotchas" are centered around the quality of the data and its uniqueness.


1- Do you expect to have part numbering conflicts?

2- What format will the data be given to you? (CSV, XML...)

3- Do you need to load WTPart BOM structures?

4- Do you need to automatically link to Documents or CAD?

5- Custom Attribute Values loaded or just OOTB attributes?

Regarding folders, I don't think it would kill the system by any mean if you stored them in a single folder but I think there would be a LOT of value in getting them into an appropriate Product/Product Line.


[cid:image001.gif@01CEC0E0.C3797F90]

Steve Vinyard
Senior Solution Architect

You could write a book on the many things to think about around this,
but for a quick comment I would never make a folder, larger then the
result returned by your max query limit - it just annoys users to see
that message that some of there data is not displayed. That said, a
million is a lot, you might have to make compromises along those lines.
Can you take advantage of any organizational information in the previous
system? Also the comment I would have, is get it a close to correct at
load time as possible so you are not constantly messing around moving
the data or clensing it after the fact.

--Bob


rpassolt
5-Regular Member
(To:jeffruff)

1 Million?? Parts or CAD Docs?


Is that full history ... all versions/revisions? or is it 1 million LATEST??


Is it coming from INTRALINK 3.X? or file system?? or another PDM???


As Bob mentioned, you could write a book about such a project.


Thanks!


Rick Passolt


Fishbowl Solutions


rpassolt@fishbowlsolutions.com


www.fishbowlsolutions.com

Hey Jeffry,


To me,the folder question is only relevant if you have to consider differences in access rights and behavior of your articles. If in the originating system there is no way to differentiate those articles, just dump them in one WT-folder, I would say.


Apart from this, I would consider assessing the sizing of your IT-infrastructure first. Airbus is managed on Windchill (I've been told, at least), so Windchill is capable of handling verybig data sets. But if your servers and network are not setup properly, your upcoming merge will not be a big success.


Another remark in this perspective. Is anyone ever confronted with a split of the database? Suppose a part of your company is acquired by someone else, and hence, your data has to get out of Windchill, to be imported in an alien environment. Is there a scenario to accomplished this (just an academic question)?


Regards, Hugo.


<< ProE WF5 - PDMLink 9.1 M060>>



In Reply to Jeffry Ruff:



We are bringing another business into the Windchill fold. This business has over a million parts to be loaded, and I am interested if anyone has any experience with loading this many parts what worked well and what did not work. Example, I would suspect that placing all parts into one folder is probably not a good thing, but what are the guidlines for number of objects in a folder? I would expect that searching would be negatively impacted and that we should look into indexing, but has anyone any experience to support his?


I am also interested in hearing about any other thoughs and experiences.


Thanks in advance for you assistance.




Are you talking about WTParts or CAD?


Really to give you good advice we would need a little more information. Why do you want to load the data? What are you planning to achieve and what is the benefit to your business from doing that? Presumably the intent is to migrate the group and their data, so you transition control and management of all the information to a single Windchill system?


Really that is where your challenge is. The system mechanics of loading data to Windchill is easy enough, fiddly and painful but logical and straightforward once you know what you are doing. It is also simple enough to get Windchill to handle a large dataset and user count as long as your hardware is up to the job. Your real challenge is actually on the human side of the migration, particularly around control of the data, specifically access control and business processes.


Are you planning to transition the incoming users to your existing data and business model? Or Implement their current setup in your existing system? Does your new group need to interact and collaborate with your existing users? Do you need to transition everyone to the same Library parts? It is questions like that you need to ask and get answers to before you worry about the system mechanics.


-----

Lewis

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