Articles
Challenging data and file management in 3D design
published in European Designengineer on October 2004
It is often difficult to combine a production management system, a design system and a potential document and production data system. Each system has been designed to serve a certain user group. When the needs of different interest groups conflict, the tools of each user group will not carry out all the repeated every day routines. Establishment of items, search of documents, individual control of file names compulsory in the 3D planning, printing and conversions of documents, and the search of information from the databases of different systems are often left to the user, even though the EDM, PDM etc. systems are particularly designed to facilitate the daily tasks of the engineering.
CustomTools is a SolidWorks® Gold Partner product for designers. It automates daily routines and in addition to the features of the normal attribute basis utility programs, clings to the often forgotten pain pots of the order delivery process. This is done particularly from the point of view of engineering.
Free definition of objects
In different systems that are supposed to assist in product data management, the fields that are meant for the definition and describing of different objects are defined in advance. The fields can perhaps be freely named but their properties are hard coded. This causes conflicts between the properties of the system and the needs of the organization. Also, when combining separate systems, these hard coded properties of the systems cause enormously additional trouble.
In CustomTools, all the properties of the different fields can be freely determined. The way of filling the fields, configuration basis of the field, obligatoriness etc. are only a few properties that can be individually commanded between different fields (Fig. 1). The definition information is saved in a configuration file with the help of which it is easy to manage different definitions.
When acting in slow network environments, even the way of handling the configuration file is of significance. Real-time reading of the configuration file might the system to stuck for several seconds. In CustomTools, handling the configuration file has been solved so that the information is read from the configuration file to the main memory of the user's computer during the start-up of the base (SolidWorks). In addition to this, changes in the configuration file are examined in real time; if a change takes place in the definitions, they will be updated in real time to the users’ interfaces and thus the delay in the use will not get to happen. All the functions will execute instantly.
Interfaces between separate systems
The needs and systems in use are often company-specific, in which casejoining separate functions together is both difficult and expensive. Usually it also requires much tailoring, which, on other hand, is expensive to perform.
In CustomTools, connections between for example engineering and production management system can be carried out using ODBC. In that case, there’s no need to make any customer-specific tailoring to combine the systems. Directing the information in the databases to the defined attributes and exporting the possible items and structures from engineering to for example a transfer file or database table is easy to perform with the user interface of CustomTools itself.
Printing and file conversions
The engineering documentation (3D model) will not do as the manufacturing document directly, so a 2D drawing is produced for manufacture. That, however, because of a big file size and awkward processing, is in its native form poorly suitable for production. In addition to the paper outputs it is necessary to convert the drawings to file formats which are more easily dealt with. If a company uses a general EDM system, it will be more sensible to take document views to these systems as a general file format than the native format of the CAD system.
CustomTools combines printing with different printing profiles and drawing sheet name based selective file conversions into a mass operation that is performed all at once. The mass operation can be started for example based on the assembly file, in which case all the manufacturing drawings related to the parts of the assembly are collected to the list of the target documents. Selected operations are performed to all documents in the list. It is possible to remove and add documents to the list. Furthermore, the list and the operations directed to it can be stored as a separate work for a later execution (Fig. 2).
For later use of converted files for example in the EDM or PDM systems there should be sufficient information in the files for feeding the data to the document cards of the before-mentioned systems. With the help of CustomTools, it is possible to direct appropriate attributes of 3D models and 2D drawings to conversion files created during mass operation. Moreover, it is possible to freely define filenames of converted files according to the specified attributes.
In this way, the EDM and PDM system specific attribute information can be automatically fed to conversion files and thus the distribution process of the engineering documents can be automated as highly as it is technically possible - and still without tailoring.
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