Methods to Effectively Reuse the Design Data

Have we ever imagined how many workman hours we lose in trying to Reuse the Data which is supposed to be saving the time and money instead of losing them? It includes time spent on,

•  Searching right version of the data among many file versions created by our team members.

•  Finding missing references of data.

•  Recreating the File/Folder structure.

•  Maintaining Filenames/Folder names.

The losses may sum up nearly the savings we make from data reuse. Hence it needs a system that is as much effective as possible to ease the pain and improve the Return of Investment spent on maintaining and reusing the older project files. The system we are proposing for this data reuse is SOLIDWORKS Product Data Management. Being a proven data management solution, SOLIDWORKS PDM provides excellent data management and reuse tools like Search tools, copy tree, Branching and Merging.

SOLIDWORKS PDM Search Tools:

The initial time-consuming process in data reuse is running searches for various files and its references. To overcome this SOLIDWORKS PDM provides two kinds of search options – Embedded Search and PDM Complete Search Tool. The Embedded Search is same as we have in windows explorer that runs search for files and folder whereas the PDM Search tool provides a flexible and customizable search options. The Search keyworks can be filenames, folder names, file extensions and meta data combined with Operators like AND, OR & NOT. The SOLIDWORKS PDM Search tool provides a separate window exclusively with,
1. Search Toolbar – provides options like Run, Stop, Delete & Save searches.
2. Search Favorites – lists the frequently made searches and searches added to favorites list.
3. Searches – lists the different default and customized Search Cards based searches.
4. Search in Vaults – lists all the available vaults to make searches in multiple vaults at same time.
5. Search Form – Displays form of selected search card where we can provide search criteria.
6. Results – Lists the files and folders relevant to the search criteria we provided in search form.
7. Tabs – Shows file preview, data card, Version details, Bill of Materials, etc.

Note: The Embedded Search is available both in SOLIDWORKS PDM Standard as well as PDM Professional Whereas the Complete Search tools is available only in SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional.

Copy Tree Dialog Box:

Once finding the right data is a success, the next step is extracting the data without missing any file references and organizing them with proper file name and folder structure. For this, SOLIDWORKS PDM provides a tool called Copy Tree which acts similar to the SOLIDWORKS Pack and Go tool. Here the major difference is Copy tree tool can preserve the folder structure for parent and child reference files with Preserve Relative Path option. Also, PDM features like regenerating Serial Numbers for file Number, replacing file name with Serial Number, File Warnings, Check-in options are available with which projects can be copied and organized as per our requirement. The file versions can be either the version of the selected file or the latest version. Copied files can be developed as a new project without affecting the source data.

Note: SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional has a similar tool called Move Tree which moves the Selected file and entire file structure to the destination location.

Branching and Merging:

Branching a file is like taking a copy of source file to work with for a sustained development period and later merging it with the source file to combine the file as a new version to the source file. This can be done to both CAD and Non-CAD documents. The same source file can be branched many times. The branched files can also be re- branched if needed. The branching and merging dialog box are similar to Copy Tree dialog box with all the options available similarly. In addition, branching dialog box will have a separate test box for providing a name to the branch operation. The branching operation will be recorded to the history of the file so that it can be referenced in future. Merging dialog box will provide no option for destination file location since the files will be merged only to the source file in the source file location. With branching and merging source data can be reused to build a separate project as a version of source project and later if needed both projects can be merged to make the source project as a updated revision. Hence Branching and Merging not only provides data reuse capability but also the older data replacement capability for minimizing duplicate file stack-up inside the vault

THANK YOU FOR READING!