New Company Frustation (SolidWorks Discussion) 4

[JimmyTorpedo]

New to the Forums, about 4 years experience with SolidWorks, and just recently hired as a "Design Engineer". My frustration is: 1. I am working for a small company so any type of saving / file format system is nonexistent; it seems previous designers made up their own system with no coordination with anyone else within the company. 2. There have been about 3 users on the system I am currently using and each user has setup their own "WINDOWS PROFILE" and with doing so there has been numerous copies of the same drawing, and what is frustrating is if I am in one profile modding a file, such file is also modded in the other profiles....very frustrating. and 3. It is now my task to organize this mess, I must painstakingly go through each folder and locate all SolidWorks drawings. I have spent all day just locating folders that have such files so I started writing them down in word, and then I write out all part / assembly / and drawing files....and one folder may contain anywhere from 20 to 80 drawings / assembly / drawing and PDFs files of such. In the end boss man wants duplicates gone from all user profile, and wants me to organize all drawings into appropriate customer accounts. HELP!!!! The way I have been going through the computer system seems like such the long way around, if its the only course then I will knuckle down but if there is a more efficient way please I am open for suggestions. My arms and hands are hurting so much from doing this all day!!!!

Thank you ahead of time,

James

 

[MadMango]

Please see:
thread559-113237

https://forum.solidworks.com/thread/7846

"Art without engineering is dreaming; Engineering without art is calculating."

Have you read faq731-376 to make the best use of these Forums?

 

[JMirisola]

Been there, done that, doing it now.
There's no easy way to go about what you have to do. While a PDM system will help you in the future, you're going to have to slog through the legacy files for the time being. My suggestion would be to start with the newest profile first as that should contain the most up-to-date files. Get them organized then go through the older profiles. Duplicates can easily be dumped and newly found files can be organized appropriately.
You may want to get an external drive, or network location, to dump all the previous users' files onto to quarantine them until you know good from bad, usable vs junk, etc.

Jeff Mirisola
My Blog

 

[ctopher]

I hate being a file cop!
I have trained PDM users in the past, and still do it here.
There are always going to be users that want to do things their way because they can't learn how to do it the "correct way".

Chris
SolidWorks 11
ctopher's home
SolidWorks Legion

 

[JimmyTorpedo]

Thank you for the replies; I had a feeling I was going to have to wade through all this! I will be looking into PDM and hopefully my system for starting this will work, at least I have a job and at least I am being paid for this.

Thanks again,

James

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

You may be able to use Pack & Go to help speed & simplify the process.

Are the parts single project or product based? i.e. Are parts called into multiple projects/products across different project folders?
Has a common library of 'standard' parts been used.
Are you using Toolbox?
Are you maintaining the same numbering system?

Without knowing the actual structure of the mess you have to work with, it's difficult to offer an explicit strategy.

Whatever you do, make sure you have a complete backup of all files before attempting to sort them out.

 

[SnowCrash]

If you have assemblies to work from you can build a bill of materials with columns related to part name, file name, and directory. Then you will know which ones are duplicated. It is a tedious problem. Couple of jobs back they used text names to identify files but dumped projects into folders. There were many duplicate part names. More recently the company prefixed the drawing file with the date in the format "2012-11-13" which was helpful, but I moved it to a suffix. I also incorporate the REV level in the drawing file name.
Part number and drawing number are not always the same thing. I control part numbers from a spreadsheet since this is a one man shop.

--
Hardie "Crashj" Johnson
SW 2011 SP 4.0
HP Pavillion Elite HPE
W7 Pro, Nvidia Quaddro FX580

 

[mdana]

I feel your pain. I just started consulting with a start-up and have run into the same problem. To make matters worse, we have people running SW2012, 2009, and 2011.

 

[behindpropellers]

If you are working with others you really need to sit down and come up with a document that explains workflow and standard practices.

I'm living a similar situation. No standard practices. To add to the frustration the computers that they are using are not up to par for the complexity of the files.

Tim

 

[ShaggyPE]

Been there too. Approx 5000 files. This company also purposely made duplicate files. Each part was contained in its own folder. Each assembly was contained in its own folder... but within the assembly folder were all the parts contained in that assembly. The next assembly up, you guessed it, contained all assemblies and parts within that assembly. lol.

I highly recommend using an application called Dupe Killer (or similar). Here's one option:

http://www.bigbangenterprises.de/en/doublekiller/

Just be careful. Be very methodical.

-Dustin
Professional Engineer
Pretty good with SolidWorks