new to Windchill and Creo too...need big time assistance with legacy data

Do you understand what Windchill is and what it can do? Until you and your co0mpany understand Windchill, you will feel like you are always fighting a battle.

Windchill itself is nothing but a large toolkit for building an application. Which application tool of Windchill does your company have, IntraLink or PDMLink? They are similar but different. Which you have will determine what level of documentation/CAD filing will be stored in the Windchill database.

First step is to add common hardware items into Windchill so other designs can use the common items. BUT, with things stored on disk, you may have multiple files of the same part. These need to be consolidated in Windchill into a single instance. Do you use family tables for hardware, if so, then that may save some of the headache, as long as you currently only use 1 family table for bolts. I worked at one company where they loaded 4 different family tables of socket head cap screws into Windchill because each product group had their own family tables in the old system. They renamed the family tables to add a product group prefix to each family table. Do NOT do this!

Current working designs, load from disk and then save to Windchill. This will populate the Windchill database the easiest and quickest. BUT, you need to understand if you have PDMLink or IntraLink as the do things a little differently depending on how your company plans to use the Windchill tools.

Many more things to learn and do, but this should give you a headache, I mean a start.

Been using PDMLink since V6.2.6 in 2003 and am still learning.