Data exchange from to PDM?

[mp3-250]

Since we are using SW PDM mainly to manage a part of our CAD files only, we want to make more out of the system I would like to ask what kind of data do you share from/to PDM and how you achieve that.

[JSculley]

I wrote an add-in to connect to our Oracle system for the purpose of creating part numbers so that we engineers didn't need to manually create numbers in Oracle (a very painful process) and then Save/Save As our models to those part numbers. We just do a 'Submit for Release' transition and the add-in creates the item numbers in Oracle and then renames/moves the files to directories based on the Oracle number.

I've been working on replacing our Engineering Support Request system, which is currently just people e-mailing us an Excel based form (which is never filled out completely or correctly), with a PDM based XML document where the users enter info on the data card and have an actual PDM workflow.

Long term plan includes being able to generate purchase requisitions/machine shop orders directly from a SW/PDM assembly.

If you can write code, there's really nothing you can't do or connect with PDM.

[mp3-250]

@JSculley thank you for your contribution.

I think one of the main challenges, at least for us, would be to have a clean source of data.

We still have several systems not fully integrated together, all with their own limitations. Legacy systems should be phased out, but it is difficult to say when and if they are going to be abandoned for good.
This discouraged many attemps to build something useful with PDM.

Another big challenge would be to fix PDM itself and engineering processes once and for all.
The previous admin messed up the pdm system not once, but twice and we are still dealing with a mountain of working versions in pdm that are in fact released drawings floating in various states and several parts of the system that were literally messed up or abandoned
I am trying to fix it little by little, but I am understanding it is a job that goes well outside the PDM boundaries as the engineering process has a lot of inputs and outputs I do not fully understand yet.

Then our drawings are still a mix of 2D and 3D cad with the 2D completely outside PDM control.
The other systems were in place with 2D in mind in the first place, so 2D cad could be released as tiff/pdf (including paper scans which are still used) for the whole company.

For this reason I am trying to see what other companies do with PDM to have a better idea on what to aim when fixing (remaking) our PDM.

[CarrieIves]

We have only been using PDM for a bit over a year here. We only have PDM Standard. We are a design services company, so our interactions with manufacturing products are not the same as many companies that make products. We do have a workflow so we can release drawings. We add an indented BOM to our top level assemblies. We export this and run it through a Python script to bring it into Excel. This Excel BOM can be shared more easily. One of the things we capture as part of this export is the version. We can then use PDM to do a BOM compare. (I found out recently, that Excel can also compare files. There is an add-in that must be enabled. I have not used it much yet.)

Places I have worked at in the past have pulled BOMs from SolidWorks or PDM to import into systems like Agile. One of the things that we had trouble with there was determining make or buy for particular part numbers. We came to a bit of a compromise. In SolidWorks would define the type of part (injection molded, sheet metal, cable assembly, off-the-shelf). This information could then be used as the parts went into the PLM system to help with the make/buy coding. A problem that company encountered regularly was parts changing their make/buy status based on the shop's workload.

We are creating PDFs and sometimes STEP files and sending them through our workflow to have one known location for the released versions of things.