Windchill and Creo with non-Each UOM

[AL_ANDERSON]

Solutions Group,

We are moving into the WTPart-EPMDocument linked features of Windchill on
a big project in Windchill 10.1, and we have run into a problem that I
hope someone has seen before in order to give us some advice.

We have a WTPart and owner linked Creo assembly (actually, it is a Creo
Configurable Product from options modeler, but that is basically an
assembly) that uses 2 "1-foot long" instances of a flexible conduit part
number has "foot" as a default unit of measure. Creo will not allow
anything other than "each" to have more than one occurrence in a bill of
material. Logically, PTC's software constraint makes sense. It seems
like PTC insists that any 1-foot long flexible conduit has to have a
unique part number, and every possible length of conduit needs a different
unique part number. Therefore, a 1-foot long flexible conduit would need
a different part number than a 3-foot long flexible conduit that is
identical in all respects except for length, and despite the fact that in
our ERP system we order this flexible conduit by "feet" where we can
purchase 50 feet, or 100 feet, or whatever. I suppose this might be a
"make from" condition where we would need a part number for every length
as EACH and a made from link to a common number that we order in variable
"feet," but we don't know how PTC's Creo and linked WTPart bill of
material should use "make from" in a way that works in both Windchill and
ERP (we use Baan, but any ERP system would have similar issues with this
kind of part).

Has anyone else in a linked WTPart-CAD environment solved this problem?
What did you do?

Thanks.

Al Anderson
Solar Turbines Incorporated

[SteveVinyard]

Hi Al, this is a consistent issue. I think most people set it to be "As Required" in the BOM or something similar but I'm not aware of Creo limiting you to one occurance (I'm not a huge CAD guy).

I've also been told that you can, for some cases, do the flexible modeling scenario but it definitely has some limitations. I feel like I've forgotten more than I remember about this so hopefully we'll get some more responses. I'll ping one of my CAD gurus on the Creo stuff and get back to you.

[cid:image001.gif@01CECBE6.6B1C81B0]

Steve Vinyard
Senior Solution Architect

[BrianToussaint]

Al,

We use CREO to drive everything in our BOM except for things in feet, meters, pounds, etc. Since the linking only looks at each quantity to build the BOMs, we no longer link these CAD items to the wtParts. Instead the engineers have to add those items into the BOM after creation and set the correct values. So if we have 1.25 feet of a gasket, then we need to put that in manually. Where we have worked with flexible components, like wire ties where we put them according to the insulation they are over, it has added them up with the correct quantities.

Sincerely,

Brian Toussaint
CAD Administrator

Hoshizaki America, Inc.
"A Superior Degree Of Reliability"
618 Hwy. 74 S., Peachtree City, GA 30269

[GregoryPERASSO]

Hello

In 10, Windchill allow you to link different CADpart (different representation)to a single WTpart number. One by owner link , and the others by image links.

But it assumes it is the same part (for an electrical harness = the same length, but with a different form, due to his path in the product)

So the quantity will be for example2, unit each ... It will not solve your use case.

You can as said Brian, put your parts in the CAD assy, and marked it "not for build" . So let you update the WTpart BOM manually ...

You can also let ProE build the eBOM with a "each" quantity (and may be designate the Length parameter of you CAD part), and use MPMLink to "transform" this in mBOM with the correct UOM.

Anyway. You should create an idea for this case. Beeing able todefine a unit and the"driving quantity parameter" in some CAD Part, to build corretly this case in the WTpart BOM. I will vote for it !

regards

Gregory

[avillanueva]

This confounds my engineers sometimes. They use repeat regions to generate their find numbers so they want to have placeholders for those non-each components. We do the same, delete and re-add. This is another reason why we adopted view versions to "clean up" the BOM from the Pro/E defaults.