How to manage product families in Windchill (disadvantages of Family Tables in WC)?

Hi,

I have to create some assemblies which contain parts in common and have different (between each other) assembly-level features inside (extrusions, holes...).

We thought about two alternatives on how to manage these assemblies:

1) make a base assembly (named A.asm) and all the variations contain A.asm as a sub-assembly + the assembly-level features: so for example the version B.asm contains A.asm + some features.

2) manage them with a family table (FT): the generic is A.asm and then all the different variations are its instances with assembly-level features performed on the instance only.

This is because we want to keep a link between the base assembly and its different versions, so that, for Materials Requirements Planning, we can determine how many A.asm are necessary starting from the total number of B.asm + C.asm + D .asm...etc..etc..

With both the methods this link is maintained, but at first sight the FT method seems to be cleaner and simpler (also less memory consuming).

My questions are:

- Is it convenient to manage FTs in Windchill?

- Does it have some disadvantages?

- Which method would you suggest me to use and why?

thanks

bye