Sharing the Contents of an ECN with Contract Manufacturer?

[ScottMorris]

We have the need to share the output of an ECN with a contract manufacturer.

Has anyone already found a good solution for creating a Change Package to share with a CM? 

Document changes are easy to deal with, but CAD is more complicated since there is no download action from the Resulting Objects table for an ECN task. Windchill provides the options to add them to a Workspace or Copy them to the Clipboard. 

I have tried Windchill Packages, which works really well if you collect the ECN Tasks and Resulting objects, but it also includes all the source CAD files. I would rather only share STEP for CAD models, PDF for CAD drawings and Creo View files.

Windchill Packages seems like a viable solution, but we definitely need a way to automate the creation of the package with the desired items as part of the ECN workflow. Adding this as a manual step for every ECN would significantly increase the workload of the configuration management team. 

[STEVEG]

I would check with Fishbowl.  They have a product called linkAccess and it seems can do many things.  We use it to export out some data from specific models under certain criteria during the change management process.  It took a bit to get it working but works great once it's set up correctly.

[Ajit_Kulkarni]

Hello,

I think you need a customization for either Windchill package creation or in change process to generate customize package. 

The customization might include to publish the cad and generate step files if those are not already generated. Also to package everything and send it to desired recipients. 

Thanks!! 

[avillanueva]

We are toying with the idea of creating a Thingworx Navigate tile to do this. I think it can work since you can program the many steps of the package creation. There is features of packages where you can block creo files and only package PDFS and STEP. Wrapping this in an app would enforce that to where they only needed to provide object numbers.

[ScottMorris]

Thank you for all the insight! I had a call with Lisa and Nick from PTC the other day confirming Windchill Packages is the correct solution for this. Lisa showed my how to include the desired file extensions (STP & PDF) or exclude the unwanted file extensions (PRT, DRW, ASM, etc.). We're going to start exploring all the options, come up with a working process and then try to improve it over time once we know where the bottlenecks are.

Automating the Package creation process will be awesome, but we're not clear on how frequently that will need to happen until we get started.  Also want to make sure we have a good grasp on security to ensure external suppliers only have access to the content they need and not any of the source IP.