Hello everyone.  A feature I really enjoyed from Inventor Vault Pro was the "ECO Work Order" Data base. If you are not familiar, the ECO feature can be used so that it tracks drafting work in the sense of a overall mission. The work itself could be linked to 1 drawing or more or even none.  See attached and below for example:

1.) ECO 001: Create General Arrangement Drawings  - this is linked to the life cycles of the 100 and 101 drawings. 

                 the drawings are then lifecycles through approval and sent to the customer.

2.) ECO 002: Approved w/o Comments. Release Fabrication Drawings-  This is linked to many drawings.

  After a few weeks of research, I have not figured out a way to simulate this function without buying "Manage" addon. Has anyone figured out a decent solution?    Without a workflow management system in place, it requires a drafting manager to juggle work via multiple avenues.  Production schedules via excel vs all of the incoming misc request filter to a drafting managers private work list for the week. who works, who checks, etc. 

Main Task:

      1.) Drafting work comes in the form of "Initial Approval Drawings", rework  from "Customer comments", Final Manufacturing. It also comes in the form of NCRs, change orders, standard part updates, and other random "drafting work request."

     2.) Standard workflow occurs over 4 sets of drawings. consider them the 100's.dwg, 200's.dwg, 300's.dwg, 400's.dwg each made 4 weeks from each other.   

      3.)Currently, at the start, no dwgs are made so there are no life cycles to manage.  Then as weeks roll by, and a supplemental Excel sheet loaded with dates, the drafter is told to work on the drawing by oral notification..It is only then, the drawings start to appear with life cycles via the PDM.  At this point, that particular drawing is now on the radar but has no dates for completion.  But for the entire office/manufacturing group, there is no visual "plan" as the other drawings have not been started and therefore dont exist in the PDM or any schedule that can be made from the PDM's data. 

     4.) Ability to manage work load.  So you can update the data card and have for each drawing a life cycle with life cycle target dates. But for a drawing that will have two revs minimum (approval vs final dwg), that would have multiple target dates for a Manager to update since work flow changes/adjust on a daily basis.

   5.) With PDM, how do we get away from just managing the water spilling over the bucket on a daily basis?