You Really Need a Tool for File Management

CAD is a tool. It’s a single tool. Especially when you start looking at product development, and the larger picture of design, development, manufacturing and marketing, CAD is just one tool. And if you’ve noticed real workbenches of people doing real work, the one thing you notice is that they have more than one tool. They are proficient, even masterful with more than one tool. You can’t create a lot of business critical data with just a single tool meant to create and document geometry. You can’t really afford to be a total diva specialist that only sings one note, can you?

I know a lot of people avoid a PDM tool for a lot of reasons: costs, you think you can do it yourself, you don’t see the need, you think it’s too complicated. And some of that is true. I used to make a living helping companies implement SolidWorks “simple” PDM tool, whatever they call that these days (used to be PDMWorks – PDM Standard, I think).

But here’s the thing: You really can’t do it yourself. Why are you frightened of in-context relations? Does it have anything to do with file management and accidentally breaking the links? PDM can live with in-context links.

How are you manually dealing with model revisions? Are you keeping track of model revisions at all? Even if you think you’re doing it, you’re not. Is it because you think it’s just too complex? See, you can’t do this yourself at all. You’re cutting yourself off from a lot of functionality just to save your pride.

And then there’s document approval routing or workflows for changes. Are you still schlepping a 15 pound pile of papers from desk to desk? This is easily automatable. More than anything, the software involved helps you establish rules, and then enforces them. If you’re smart about the rules you select, you can easily succeed with a PDM tool. If you really don’t know what your rules are, or if you try to be too inflexible – both lead to confusion and frustration.

If you haven’t looked at the new tools in a while, I encourage you to take a look around. There are the traditional systems like what SolidWorks is selling, but there are other types as well. Onshape, for example, manages data in a different way that makes a lot of sense. I imagine that Fusion 360 is also making file management a more built-in type of function. The problem with old CAD products is that they don’t work with data in the same way that these new management products do. And the problem with some of the new management tools is that they only work on someone else’s cloud hardware. Onshape, I believe, doesn’t even offer an option for a local install or local data. “All your datas is ours” as they say.

Eventually, I think we’ll see PDM products that allow for a local cloud, and give us the best of all worlds with some of this fancy cloud functionality locally. There’s no reason it can’t be done other than no one has developed it yet.

That’s just a little forward thinking, don’t let it discourage you from dealing with your current data management needs. PDM Standard (at least used to) come with SolidWorks professional. It’s fairly easy to use once you understand it. Its probably worth while to have someone come in and help you set it up, and make some initial decisions on how to use it.

This is how it works: SolidWorks keeps track of all parts, assemblies and drawings in a database. In the case of PDM Standard, it’s more of a text file, without a real database server, so that limits its power with big data sets, at least that’s the way it used to work. But the text file does essentially the same job as a database – it keeps track of documents, document properties, and links between documents. It even remembers which revision of a part goes on which revision of a drawing. Does your home grown system do that?

The files themselves are sometimes stored in an actual database, and sometimes just the file name is encrypted or jumbled in a way that it’s not readily human readable. the database/text file holds the key for this scrambling. Then the file/file name is decoded before the file is given back to you.

In the more modern systems, all of the part data is stored as database fields. In fact, as I understand it, even a single part isn’t stored as a single unit, it’s stored as a set of features which are each a field in the db. This makes sharing and simultaneous access better. This works the same way that you have to lock other people out of an Excel file to work on it, but in an Access database, several people can work on it at the same time. Sorry, more looking forward here.

When you call back an assembly at a specific revision level or just the latest, it knows which revisions of parts and drawings to also call up. You can lock other people into read only access also, while you are making changes to the file. One of the nice things is that the system downloads the files local to your computer to limit how much work you actually do over the network. This is something the cloud software hasn’t figured out. The people who made the cloud software know that it’s important to work locally, but they have chosen to ignore the advice they used to give.

Back to the database/text file, because you’ve got all this info in one place, it makes searches and reports much easier to create. The computer doesn’t have to crawl a bunch of individual files to get the information, it has already been captured when the document was put into the system

So the basic concept of PDM is fairly simple once you understand what’s going on. The rest of it is a bunch of settings, permissions, and properties you can assign to people to allow them to search, read, write, edit the data or meta data that is stored and controlled by the system.

SolidWorks has several levels of file management: PDM Standard, PDM Professional, and Manage. I only really understand the old names for these, PDMWorks, Conisio, and Enovia (again, as I understand the changes).

All it takes is one screw up to pay for a new system. And you might already own the system. Losing a revision, or picking the wrong revision – you don’t need me to tell you what that costs in terms of hair, money, and time.