WG CAD Manager for inventor

We have been using Inventor with the WWGM since Jan 2014. The 2 systems work well together. The only gripe my people have is needing to have Inventor on one screen & WWGM on the other. We create Windchill parts at the same time as we create CAD therefore we are required to create all CAD within Windchill.

If you have any specific questions, please let me know.

Stephen Oerton

Windchill Process Specialist

Hi,

We have Inventor and Windchill in our organisation since 2013. The integration is good with thirdparty WGM. We have some performance issues while activating workspace and add to workspace through WGM butfunctionality wise the integration is ok.

- Nazeer

Windchill Application Manager

Hi Guys

thanks for your feedback.

It seems that the integration works fine. That is good. However I am wondering if the CAD Manager can understand complex relationship between CAx files in the way the CAD Manager for Creo works (for instance, inheritance, CAM etc...)

Best regards

Hello again,

I am also trying to understand how the Inventor files are understood by Windchill. Are they stored in the same EPMDocument than the Creo files ?

If I have soft parameters defined for my 3D models, eg Length can I search for Length in Advanced search for CAD document and it will retrived Creo and Inventor files ? In other words once in Windchill it does not matter if the file is creo or inventor, Windchill consider them the same as they are stored in the same EPMDocument.

Or am I too simplistic and life is more complicated. for instance, we must have EPMDoc sub type to store files which are not Creo. and as a consequence if I search for length I must search once for Creo EPMDoc and once for Inventor file to ensure I search for all my products.

Thanks a lot and best wishes

In Reply to NacNac MOTT:

It seems that the integration works fine. That is good. However I am wondering if the CAD Manager can understand complex relationship between CAx files in the way the CAD Manager for Creo works (for instance, inheritance, CAM etc...)

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Or am I too simplistic and life is more complicated. for instance, we must have EPMDoc sub type to store files which are not Creo. and as a consequence if I search for length I must search once for Creo EPMDoc and once for Inventor file to ensure I search for all my products.

To answer your first question about CAD relationships with Inventor, Windchill can recognize Assemblies and Components with ease. Windchill recognizes/treats Inventor Weldments as assembles but are not recognized as "Inseparable" and we have issues with the Viewables of Weldments not showing the assembly level features of the weldment (machining).

To your second question, we are a true multi-cad environment consisting of mostly Inventor, followed by Creo and a few NX users. All CAD is considered as EPM documents. As long as your Inventor attributes are mapped into Windchill, they can be searched for using Saved Custom Searches and Table layouts. We have many custom Inventor iProperties mapped into Windchill and I have several custom searches created to find Mfg Part Number & Customer Number. Again as long as their mapped for both Creo & Inventor, both will show up.

We also utilized the WTPart associations Owner and Image to associate both the INV and Creo models to the same WT Part for our ERP. The hardest part we have had is determining which CAD is the owner CAD.

We are in process of implementing MPMLink & ERP connector and have so far found that for Work Instructions, it is important when having some Creo-owned & some Inventor-Owned that they are drawn the same.

Steve Oerton