Rant about company policies...

[jhyder79]

I have to get this off my chest and I figure this is the best place to do it. I used to work for a large construction/agricultural equipment company in the U.S. and became accustomed to a Pro/E system that was well maintained and fully integrated with all the other systems in the company. Due to the economic downturn, I had to leave my last job and took a new job with a agricultural equipment company from Japan.


I like the new job, but their policies regarding Pro/E make me want to punch someone. Just to name a few:


1. One part number equals a one sheet drawing. Even if you have a complex assembly that must have several views and possibly an exploded view, it must fit on one page.


2. The preferred method of creating sheetmetal parts is to creat a solid and shell it out. The use of Pro/Sheetmetal is discouraged.


3. The use of Pro/Piping is discouraged.


4. The use of Family Tables is prohibited.


WHY?


Please...someone tell me they have a worse situation.

 

[megaladon]

4. The use of Family Tables is prohibited.





i couldn't agree more!!!!





i also worked for a company where everything had to fit on one sheet and it had to be an A size drawing. we made small plastic parts but with the dims and notes it was very difficult. to add on to that i had to save it as a .dwg so that other people who worked there could work on it in autocad. anytime the model changed i would first have to find the autocad drawing to see if there had been any changes since i made it then add that stuff back to the pro-e drawing and save it as a .dwg again. i hope that place has burned to the ground.

 

[wamarler]

Interesting place to vent -- nobody here can do anything for you , least of all explain why your policies are set the way they are.

1. One part number equals a one sheet drawing. Even if you have a complex assembly that must have several views and possibly an exploded view, it must fit on one page.

Seems foolish. OTOH, are you limited to the size of the sheet? Pro/E doesn't have any limits... make it the size of a building if you need a lot of views.

2. The preferred method of creating sheetmetal parts is to creat a solid and shell it out. The use of Pro/Sheetmetal is discouraged.

Perhaps the number of sheetmetal licenses is limited, and if more people used sheetmetal, more people would be taking licenses?

3. The use of Pro/Piping is discouraged.

Same as above.

4. The use of Family Tables is prohibited.

Ahh... well now, this is the big one isn't it. Family Tables are *notorious* for causing problems in data management systems. To make a change to one instance in a table you have to check out the entire table, which could mean thousands of "parts" (even if it's just meta data). Handling has improved significantly from the Pro/INTRALINK 3.2 days, but perhaps this is a holdover policy after a particularly bad incident? Also, Family Tables are great when used properly in robust models, but many times models are not robust. Or one engineer, thinking it's a time saver to nest a family table inside another nested family table might confuse everyone else who touches the model. So I can certainly see how the policy "no family tables!" came about, even if it's somewhat pigheaded.

 

[Mindripper]

Most of these do seem like silly limitations. The drafting standards certainly allow multiple sheets, and making sheet metal parts using the sheet metal package makes complete sense to me. But I also have misgivings about family tables. I try hard to avoid them, as they create all kinds of headaches. If one dimension in one instance changes, all instances must be regenerated, and anyone else who is using any instance must update their database. If the part and it's instances aren't created corrctly, all instances must be loaded into all user's local workspaces. Yes, other CAD packages have far more effective methods for dealing with instances.


But I also have gripes about my employer's 'company policies'. We are still running WF3: we could upgrade to WF4 today, but the PowersThat Be haven't gotten around to it yet. I don't know if there is much in the way of improvements, but it would be nice to find out. So we are paying maintenance and getting nothing for it - at our own choosing. We are still using Intra/Link 3.4, which I consider an utterly lousy PDM package. The Preventers of Information Technology at our corporate offices now have exclusive control over hardware selection, and none of them have the slightest appreciation of the demands of CAD products on hardware. We end up with low-end graphics cards and minimal memory (2 GB) as a result, which costs the company millions in lost productivity. Yet, the management whines about how long it takes to get new products to market - even sending us surveys asking how to improve leadtimes. The suggestions fall on deaf ears.

 

[zpaolo]

Also, Family Tables are great when used properly in robust models, but many times models are not robust. Or one engineer, thinking it's a time saver to nest a family table inside another nested family table might confuse everyone else who touches the model. So I can certainly see how the policy "no family tables!" came about, even if it's somewhat pigheaded.

On the other hand wouldn't it be better to ask users to follow good modeling and family table practices instead of avoiding the feature completely? Wouldn't it be much better to be able to "grow" your technical staff teaching them how to model robustly and how to manage particular tools, instead of simply banning them? But of course there is not a single company I know that invest on these things :/

Paolo

 

[design-engine]

As I go around the country teaching classes I am exposed to many practices. I try to educate the managers about top down design, surfacing, cabling etc. Many managers used to use Pro/E and now they don't. Back when they used Pro/E in the 90's a contractor would come in and use surfacing and leave. The permanent employees would bitch that they could not modify the geometry so someone would make a rule 'no surfaces!' And ten years later the company policy is to not use surfaces.

In the same air of ignorance Ive seen the Library managers exclaim that top down design can not be tolerated because the library system can not handle the data. Back before there was a skeleton part we had master merge and one part that is referenced in so many other parts requires and assembly with all the other data to be entered into the system. The librarian convinces the management that top down design can not be tolerated thus the engineering team takes an added 80 percent longer in the design process in some cases. I tell this story when doing top down classes so managers can put it into perspective and not always let those silly librarians tell engineering how to get their jobs done. And we all know proe beginners can screw up the top down models.....

We also realize companies that don't embrace education are the ones that make these silly rules.

 

[Mindripper]

Non-users establishing CAD data creation andmanagement policies is an ongoing problem. At my employer, the Pro/E administrator is a not a user. At all. Never has been, never will be. This makes absolutley no sense. My boss went to introductory Pro/E training for a week: perhaps he felt that would make him a user. It's kinda like someone completing a week ofdriver's education in a classroom, then believing they actually know how to drive a motor vehicle.


One of the biggest headaches with using skeleton models, master models or any form of external references in Pro/E is the difficulty of severing the bonds. The folks at PTC just can't seem to grasp the can of worms that can be generated with these tools, or that it is frequently desirable for these interconnections to be temporary. Yes, it's very easy to break these links in at least one of the more modern MCAD tools out there (SW).