Hello,

I've used Solid Edge and Autocad for the past 7 years, Rhino for 6 years before that, and have recently changed jobs.  My new employer bought me a seat of Solid Works last week. I have used SW a little already as a I had a friend with a seat and he let me play for a bit.

The plan here is for me to pick up a small project already started in Solid Works and to then develop some new products for the company.  We work in the waste water industry. At my previous job I was designing skids for Ultrafiltration and Reverse Osmosis.  I also do electrical design.

My first question here is about whether there is value in implementing Workgroup PDM right from the start, even though I am likely to be the only seat for a very long time.  I am well aware of the problems caused by a poorly constructed library, I lived that nightmare already.  The small project that was here already is nicely modelled but poorly organized.  So my thought was to implement the PDM right from the start.

So what benefits might I see from using PDM?

The second issue has to do with the fact that we do jobs, not manufacture a product that gets done over and over.  So while two jobs may look very similar they all require substantial changes to suit the site requirements and the demands of 3rd party engineers.  What we did with Solid Edge was that all purchased parts reside in the common library, and all fabricated parts or assemblies are located in the local job folder.  All the parts and assemblies in the local job folder have the job number as a prefix to the file name.  When we did a simalar job we would use SE Revision Manager to copy the parts, and assemblies to the new job folder while simutaneously changing the job number prefix.  That way the only link between jobs is through the common library.  Make all the changes you want to the new job, any part with a job number prefix is okay to modify. How would I accieve a similar result in Solid Works?

Thanks,

Gary H. Lucas