Currently, and for at least as long as I've worked here, we have one drawing per fixture (i.e. assembly) with all of the orthographic views, sections and details contained in it (nearly all of them are in AutoCAD, since we just started implementing SolidWorks within the past few months). There are no individual drawings for separate parts. To make matters worse, we have absolutely NO part numbers to reference, and we're usually stuck with trying to come up with some unique way of identifying the parts. I'm also not getting any help from the sales team for a numbering scheme so I know this is going to fall back on the drafting department to figure it out, and then they'll tell us a hundred reasons why we did it wrong.

The more we talk about it, the more it looks like we'd be better off by having one part per drawing file and one (or more) assembly drawings showing how all of the parts fit together. I know this is probably how nearly all of you already do your drawings, but please understand that this is a huge paradigm shift in the way we think about drawings. That being said, I have some questions:

• When you issue your drawings to your build teams, what do they get?
• Is is one giant stack of paper with an assembly drawing and each part drawing that would be needed to build the assembly?
• Is is just an assembly drawing and they have to go back and find the drawings for each part from a binder?
• If it's the former, how do you collect the part drawing sheets and make sure that they have everything they need, especially if you have 100+ parts in an assembly?
• Is there an automated way of doing this or is it a lot of manual work?
• How are your part numbers and assembly/sub-assembly numbers differentiated from each other?



One more thing to note, we do not have PDM installed yet, but I have scheduled out IT person to do it next week. I have no idea how to use it, but if your system/solution involves using it, please let me know.