I am the CAD administrator at my company, and I want to clean up some long-standing poor practices and entrenched issues with our solid models, but I am unsure of the best way to move forward. The basic issue is that while we have been using SW for about 10 years, we have only in the past 2 years started to standardize file templates, drawing formats, file properties, materials etc. The older, non-standard files often have a number of settings which cause serious hair-pulling among our engineers.

What’s difficult about the existing files is that often our new designs are slight modifications of old designs, which means we want to start from the old design, save-as to a new filename and then make whatever changes are necessary for the new design. This process means that we cannot stamp out easily the old files because all their bad settings get copied along to the new parts.

For reference, here is an incomplete list of a few of the settings we’ve seen that cause problems:

1. Assemblies with configurations that have the “Suppress new features and mates” box checked. Our new file templates do not have this checked and that is absolutely the way we want it to be, but many old files do have it checked.
2. Part with “Suppress new features” checked. Same as #1, but for parts.
3. Parts with no assigned material or a material from the wrong database.
4. Parts/Assemblies with the wrong unit system.
5. Parts/Assemblies without a weight property or other custom property now defined in our standard templates.
6. Files with drafting standards other than the correct standard.

What would you suggest is the best way to attack issues like these?

Thanks!

Eric