Pro/E change documentation process ?

[smilingfirefly]

Ok, I'm stumped.
I work as one of the Pro/E Admins for a large government company.
We are transitioning from a 2D basic CAD system to trying to go full Pro/E. We are meeting with a lot of resistance to change. People don't want to change the way we do things greatly. So here's our process and could someone tell me if I'm on track with matching it.

We have a released drawing. There are Engineering changes released as separate documentation. Then before there are too many they are incorporated into the drawing at a new revision.

Pro/E isn't so great at this if you want to keep things linked. When the change is made it's made. Our current Pro/E drawings we convert the changed images to our 2D Cad system to document the changes, and don't incorporate and update the revision till enough changes are made.

So here's the new method.
Say we start with an A revision.

A revision gets modified and drawing is updated, will be released as an A1 for the first change package.

The documentation is done as a markup to the drawing(Pro/E markup file type), indicating the changes that were made so the change can be documented properly without just showing the final result (they like to see only what changed).

Once the revision is up to say A6, an incorporation will be done. Since the drawing is always being updated it's pretty much just paper documentation to match our current system. Promoting it to a B.

Any other thoughts of being able to show just the changes without loosing the connection between the model, the drawings, and the change documentation?

In regular pro/E world you would basically just make the changes and have the drawing completely revised. But with large documents it can be hard to identify what was actually changed.

Thanks!

 

[vlad1979]

Ido this kindof things like this:I have a released drawing (by the way I work with Intralink) and when a change is required, say there is a chamfer that needs to be added, I modify the model, the drawing gets updated showing the chamfer. Then I add a table to the drawing with a revision note whereI briefly say what changed. And then put a change balloon (A) near the chamfer dimensioning. This balloon is easy to spot and see what has changed.


This way the drawing gets updated once, I have the table with revision notes that has the history of changes and the revision balloons on the drawing.I don't have to do the work twice (your case, if I understand correctly). I mean tomake a separate documentation only for the changes and then at a later date make the same changes on the final drawing.


If at a later date the drawing gets crowded with balloons and revisions, I make a duplicate of the drawing erase all the revisions and puta note on the drawing saying this is the latest version the others are considered obsolete (this in case manufacturing has old printed drawings), and the old model/drawing I rename it to obsolete or old, or even delete it in some cases.


But in your case, just a thought, if you have intralink (I domost ofthe work with intralink)and you have a large drawing and want to show only the change you could make a separate sheet to the drawing and put there a simplified rep of your assy, or put just a detailed view of your part to show the change. This way the link between part/drawing will be kept. You make the changes on the model, update the drawing put a revision note or whatever, and check-in. When check-in is made you can change the model and drawing versions to revisions A, B, C...


Now,when you want to show/print only the A change and not B and C you can make a check-out from commonspace only for that version/revision. You have all the previous versions/revisions in commonspace.


But still it looks to me it's time consuming to make simplified reps, I'm not too happy doing this.


Maybe someone else has a different way of keeping track of the changes. I'm curious myself of how different companies keep track of the changes.


But in your case just an idea you could make simplified reps on a different sheet on the drawing to show the change, this is what I'm thinking right now.

 

[smilingfirefly]

We do something similar with some of our drawings that were originally all manually done with parts lists written on the drawing. Our parts lists are done under an old Cobol based system keeping them separate from the drawings. Pro/E of course throws a big monkey wrench into everything. So our electronic parts release system has to be changed too, so it's the core of the change document. The graphic sheets are tacked on to the back to have someone later change the drawing. I know redundant but it's the government.

We use intralink 3.4 and are working on upgrading to PDMLink with an Oracle PLM/PDM front end. Pro/E wildfire 2.0 working on upgrading to 3.0 same time we do the intralink upgrade.

The whole time we've had Pro/E we've tried to make it fit our system with only minor changes. That way only a few people freak out over the changes, and the masses that agree with the change will silence them.

Basically our change doc just shows images of what changed on the drawing and writes out what would be put in the block. Either way it seems like we're going backwards in our approach. Not as bad as them wanting to keep the change docs in microstation (a 2D lined based cad).

So my idea was to pull out of the drawing what was changed and include some form of BOM update to show what we really did. Pro/E would take care of the rest keeping the models and drawings up to date.

Keep in mind our drawings range from 1 page to 200+ pages (electrical), and parts lists are just as bad, so putting that on someone's desk/monitor to review is a daunting task to hunt down the changes especially when some changes are only given 24 hour turn around no matter how complex. Hence the need to just show what changed, especially if it's just a little thing. We also have some items that are currently understood, like you can say "add ... thoughout where .... is called out" or "in all places change x to y"

We would rather have a change document that shows the changes and be able to have the current updated pro/e drawing there for them to look at if they wish to see it incorporated.

Also we make sooo many changes. We took one drawing to an AA with 6 changes for each revision (A, A1, A2....A6, B) which is quite a bit just to one drawing. Most of our stuff is assembly related and you have to document the changes all the way up the production line sometimes. Again gov. red tape but it keeps us out of trouble too.