We are piloting pdmwe and trying to determine what our usagepolicies might be for some various scenarios that we encountertoday and one of them is how to handle data supplied by 3rd partydesigners, not commodity library stuff but custom designed for ourcompany.
Here is a summarized vesion of the scenario:
Receive updated project that is already in our vault; documents inthe vault are in various states, some Approved, some PendingApproval, some Work In Progress, etc... Some of this data beingreceived may be referenced by other projects in the vault (a shareddocument).
Questions
1. How does the internal user reconcile these documents anddetermine what has been revised by the 3rd party and what has notbeen changed?
2. What happens when the vaulted version of the document is in anApproved state that does not allow for Check Out (In my testing Ihave found that the user must, at a minimum, be able to check outthe document so that they can replace it with the reviseddocument). I assume the user must change the document to Work InProgress, then replace the vaulted document with the reviseddocument from the 3rd party, then "push" the document through theworkflow to get it back to Approved? Doing this maintains theprevious revision and creates the document history but seemstedious.
3. Would a special "3rdPartyDesign" workflow allow for an easierway to manage this data? I am not sure we can say that a particulardesign is always managed by a 3rd party. Would this also require aparticular Category?
4. Does anyone have any special way of handling shared documents inthe vault? Is there a pro-active way for pdmwe to notify the userthat the document they are trying to check out (or change state) isshared with another project and they need to consider that theirdesign changes may not work for the other project. Or someway toautomatically require an approval for every project that sharesthat document prior to that shared document being revised?
I would appreciate any comments but in particular from anyone whois managing inhouse designs and 3rd party designs in one vault.
This includes any additional questions that I should be asking butI am not smart enough to ask....
Thanks,
SamSolidworksSolidworks Pdm enterprise Pdm
Here is a summarized vesion of the scenario:
Receive updated project that is already in our vault; documents inthe vault are in various states, some Approved, some PendingApproval, some Work In Progress, etc... Some of this data beingreceived may be referenced by other projects in the vault (a shareddocument).
Questions
1. How does the internal user reconcile these documents anddetermine what has been revised by the 3rd party and what has notbeen changed?
2. What happens when the vaulted version of the document is in anApproved state that does not allow for Check Out (In my testing Ihave found that the user must, at a minimum, be able to check outthe document so that they can replace it with the reviseddocument). I assume the user must change the document to Work InProgress, then replace the vaulted document with the reviseddocument from the 3rd party, then "push" the document through theworkflow to get it back to Approved? Doing this maintains theprevious revision and creates the document history but seemstedious.
3. Would a special "3rdPartyDesign" workflow allow for an easierway to manage this data? I am not sure we can say that a particulardesign is always managed by a 3rd party. Would this also require aparticular Category?
4. Does anyone have any special way of handling shared documents inthe vault? Is there a pro-active way for pdmwe to notify the userthat the document they are trying to check out (or change state) isshared with another project and they need to consider that theirdesign changes may not work for the other project. Or someway toautomatically require an approval for every project that sharesthat document prior to that shared document being revised?
I would appreciate any comments but in particular from anyone whois managing inhouse designs and 3rd party designs in one vault.
This includes any additional questions that I should be asking butI am not smart enough to ask....
Thanks,
SamSolidworksSolidworks Pdm enterprise Pdm
