PDM for NX3 and Solidworks 1

[emissivity]

Can someone recommend a user friendly PDM for NX3 and Solidworks environment?

I have ruled out Teamcenter and Smartteam due to the high cost. We are a small engineering company looking to control our 3D part models and drawings.

 

[solid21]

Maybe you should take a look at the newly released Teamcenter Express which is part of the UGS Velocity series. It looks to be Teamcenter, but preconfigured for simple installation. Looking at the literature, it supports multi cad platforms

 

[Duece]

You should check out PDMworks offered thru your Solidworks reseller.

User friendly, will not require an IT person almost full-time and cost is quite reasonable.

HTH

 

[J-C]

PDM/Works won't handle UG files. It can check-in any file but it will not handle file relationships between files from any cad program except Solidworks.

I'm not sure of any PDMs out there besides Teamcenter that handle UG.

Jason

UG NX2.02.2 on Win2000 SP3
SolidWorks 2005 SP5.0 on WinXP SP2
SolidWorks 2006 SP1.0 on WinXP SP2

 

[looslib]

PTC's WIndchill PDMLink will handle UG files and the file relations.

It would cost more than TeamCenter to implement, however.



"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."
"Fixed in the next release" should replace "Product First" as the PTC slogan.

Ben Loosli
CAD/CAM System Analyst
Ingersoll-Rand

 

[uwam2ie]

PDM has never been cheap the cost of introduction,and maintenance is killing the bennefit in small companies. Rules for filemangement can be more effective.
uw

 

[ewh]

uwam2ie,
Rules for file management alone can only be effective in a small, well-disciplined work group who know and follow all of the rules. Once an important file is mistakenly deleted, it loses that effectivity. PDM enforces those rules, eliminating the very real danger of accidentally revising or deleting files which are supposed to be controlled. There are many more benefits to PDM than that, such as organizing your files, having a searchable history, and controlling processes (approvals and revisions).
A real life example that I am cleaning up now: We use UG and SolidWorks. A new project manager downloads UG part files from a customer onto the server. These parts are actually "dumb" copies of our own parts (same names), which the customer had approved and sent back to us to document the "as built" condition, and should never been mixed up with our production files. Another engineer is working on a UG assembly which contains some of the original parts. When he opens the assembly, some of the "dumb" parts are loaded. He makes his changes and saves the file.
Meanwhile, another engineer opens a released UG assembly in SW. Of course, SW makes copies of all of the parts in that assembly and puts them in the same (released and protected) folder as the original UG file.
Now I have to reconstruct the first engineers assembly to reflect the correct associative parts, and then I have to go through the released directory and delete all of those SW files that do not belong there.
Wasted time and effort that would have been avoided with a decent PDM system.

 

[HellBent]

ewh...you're absolutely correct! However, I think the key in uwam2ie's post was "small company". Small companies are forced to resort to the hopes that their guys will maintain and use proper file management as a data solution. The PDM's are just too darn expensive. I had hoped that UG would bundle something similar to IDEAS built-in PDM into NX but I should have known better...lol

Take care....

 

[bnmorgan]

EWH, we're having the same problem, specificly with the SW conversion in the same folder, just cost us a fair chunk on injection tooling because the wrong ug converted to sw file was sent. We have PDM works, but as yet haven't gotten the -=edited=- "wonderful piece of software" figured out enough to use, and our -=edited=- "wonderful retail and support company" are about as helpful as -=edited=-. Any good suggestions? PDMWorks can't be that hard, but we don't have weeks or (even hours sometimes) to really go idle on all the other projects we have to try to get it running and in place and learn what we need to do.

 

[emissivity]

I just called my UG reseller to get a demo of the Teamcenter Express. From looking at the description

http://www.ugs.com/products/velocity/teamcenterexpress/

it looks like a good candidate for our company. It looks like PDMworks competitor. I'll post my opinions of it after the demo.

 

[J-C]

Any idea what Temacenter Express costs?

Jason

UG NX2.02.2 on Win2000 SP3
SolidWorks 2005 SP5.0 on WinXP SP2
SolidWorks 2006 SP1.0 on WinXP SP2