Hello all,

First I want to thank you all in advance for any help you can provide me. I am new to PDM administrating as I have only been diving in for about 6 months on and off. I started off trying to implement workflows into our engineering department as it has been the wild west long before I got here. I have signed up for an advance IT Admin PDM class with our reseller but that isn't till late November and I can use some help with what I am trying to do.

Current situation:

Currently our engineers and designers will come up with concept designs in a user workspace that is uncontrolled. I noticed all the files they are creating use junk names like “Plate, Bearing, etc”. Well below I try and detail my idea of having a serial number generated as the part/file name while in the concept stage (C-#######). This is easy enough and I have this working. I have also done the same for our standard part files (STD-#######). We also have project files that consist of an ASSET number defined in the Project folder along with some use input defined on a part generator card I created (shown below).

Now comes the difficult part for me since I am trying to learn how to do this. I believe I will need to use API and the PDM Dispatch but not 100% sure. I want to add two transitions from the concept workflow to the Standard Workflow and the Project Workflow as shown below. I would like for the file being transitioned to rename the files per the serial number or a pop-up with my Asset Project number generator if possible.

If there is a better way to handle this please let me know. This process should be able to handle SLDPRT, SLDASM and SLDDRW files. I have seen I can do a saveas and generate a serial but this seems to fall short when doing the drawing file. I would like to use the workflow and automate this as much as I can.

I have tried to include as much detailed info as I can think of upfront to help this discussion.

Concept Workflow

Standard workflow

Project Asset Workflow

Concept Parts use the PDM serial number

Standard part numbers use a PDM serial number

When creating a project part we use this card to generate the part number with some info from the folder card and some from manual input from the operator.