Here are five lessons we’ve learned helping small- and medium-sized design and manufacturing organizations (SMEs) with their PDM solutions.
Serve thyself, pilgrim.
If you have fewer than 50 or designers, chances are that you want your team to manage their own data without dedicated, enterprise PLM resources. It’s monstrously cumbersome for a small organization to roll out the big artillery like Airbus or Toyota does with Team Center or Windchill or Enovia. The good news is that your teams can manage their own data, if you have the right tools and the right planning.
One at a time, please.
If Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice are working on a project together, sharing design ideas and editing CAD data, it is wishful thinking that merging geometry will work. Only one designer ought to be editing part geometry at a time. Of course, you can have multiple people making simple edits to a spreadsheet at the same time and even for a text document, but don’t do this with your CAD geometry. Assemblies can be divided up of course and work can proceed in parallel under controlled circumstances. What this means is that you want a file to be locked as read-only for everyone who is sharing a file unless you’re the sole individual editing the file.
Synchronization sucks
Closely related to violating “one at a time, please” is the idea teams can divide up the work, edit local versions of the truth i.e., local copies of the design files, and magically merge and synchronize the changes afterwards. Don’t do it! This way lies bedlam. Yes, computer programmers merge code branches in GitHub every day. But geometric objects are special. It is so easy to overwrite someone else’s work when synchronizing and how do you ever keep track of what is the truth, really. This is the shortcoming of using consumer-grade solutions like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and the erstwhile GrabCAD. One screwup and you’ve dwarfed the cost of doing it properly with a robust PDM tool by eating precious design resources and retracing your steps. When you read or hear the word synchronize, run for cover – eventually this will bite you. The big guys don’t do it, and neither should you.
Keep everything but be organized!
Once you’ve subscribed to the idea of a single source of truth, then life gets better. Keep every version of every part and assembly file. This lets you roll back to a previous version, and start anew, confident you haven’t spilled your good ideas on the design floor. Assemblies are a little trickier because the version of the component parts changes asynchronously but with a smart PDM, you can roll back an assembly to a specified date.
Not everyone gets to be the boss.
Even the college and high school teams we work with understand that you don’t want everyone to be an admin, and you certainly want to keep marketing and purchasing from being able to edit product data. See it, comment on it – certainly, but limit who gets to edit it. Any PDM worth its salt ought to let you control sharing easily. Privileges will run the gamut from view only to create and share new content.
Championing a new product data management solution doesn’t have the same cachet as a new AI or machine learning initiative –it’s just not nearly as flashy or exciting. But getting this right can mean the difference between product success and failure.
Next Steps:
All these best practices are baked into Kenesto ‘s cloud-based document management solution – they drive our development. For a full-function trial visit us here.
We’re happy to help you get going with a real human guiding you through the installation and setup.