Advanced Solution for Industrial Document Automation

Every Industries has so many departments and all the departments have various process from Product Enquiry to Dispatch. All these processes are governed by various documents that requires many levels of approval based on management hierarchy. Creating these many documents manually as hard copies and sending them for approval from one person to another person is time consuming and prone to errors. Also storing the hard copies for future reference or auditing purposes consumes more space with lot of risks over a period of time.

With SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional, these documents can be created as soft copies with single click and stored as digital data in a single secure location that shall be made available to right person at necessary times. The benefits of this one-time PDM implementation are many like High document Security, less process time, more organized data structure, more efficient communication between departments, Complete tracking of all projects, etc. All these can made possible with following procedure using SOLIDWORKS PDM.

Step 1: Creating required Industrial Document/Form

The various Industrial Document/Form like Sales Enquiry Form, Engineering Change Request form, New Product Development Form, etc. should be created individually in any Microsoft Office application like Excel or Word with appropriate Cells/Fields to provide necessary information regarding the process or project. These fields must be given with a field name which is later mapped with Custom Property (File->Info->Properties->Advanced Properties) of the same file. For automatic update of Fields/Cells in files added to PDM vault, the file must be enabled with macro for automatically updating all Fields. This file will be saved in a separate PDM Vault location along with other standard documents.

Step 2: Creating and Mapping the Variables

Variables are labels of data that must be provided in Document/Form through PDM database. Every variable will have different data specific to individual Document/Form added to the Vault. Individual Variables are created in PDM Administration Tool along with necessary attributes for mapping them with Document/Form data fields. Hence the values of the variables can be automatically updated in the Document/Form once the file is added to the vault. For mapping the variables with Microsoft office document Custom Properties, the block name of variables must be Custom Property and attribute name must be same as the Custom Property names of Document/Form. The vales for the variables can be set through,

• Values entered in Data Card of Document/Form

• Set Variable Action of Workflow state changing transitions

Step 3: Creating Data Card for Document/Form

Data card contains metadata (Properties) of files in PDM database. Data Cards are created in PDM Card Editor tool for different files, folders, items and templates with controls like text fields, list boxes, check boxes, tabs, etc. These controls can have special values like logged in user, created date, etc. Each of these controls are mapped with variables as required and their values are defined by the user while/after adding the file to PDM Vault. Data defined in the data card will be directly stored in the database as value of specific variable of that specific file. The same value will be mapped with the Custom property of Document/Form through the attributes created for each variable. The same value in file’s Custom Property will be updated in Fields/Cells mapped with them.

Step 4: Creating Template for Document/Form

Templates are created in New Template wizard with a data card that appears every time we execute a template command in vault. We can specify the Files (Document/Form) and Folder Structure that should be created automatically every time for a new project. The file name and folder name can be mapped with variables like Project No, Document number, etc. Templates also have user permission that lets only the appropriate user to create documents in the vault.

Step 5: Creating Workflow for Documents

Workflows are created in PDM Administration Tool as a replica of Industrial process or path through which the document moves inside an Organization. It has many States that depicts the stage of the project and Transitions that denoted the decisions of Stakeholders. In every State only the appropriate Stakeholder will have the permission to work on the file and when the file moves to another state, respective stakeholder will get notified about the file. In every Transition, actions like Increase revision number, Set Variable, conversion tasks, etc. can also be executed automatically. For example, If the value of variable Approved By is set to have updated to Username making the approval transition then the file will automatically have the signature of user who is approving the file.