Revision management in Teamcenter

[Sylviane]

Hi,

at my company we are using Solid Edge ST2 with Teamcenter Express v4.1.1. We are having issues with revision management in Teamcenter and I would appreciate any input regarding handling revisions in Teamcenter. We are looking into upgrading to NX and full Teamcenter, and will do so rather quickly if we know that this will solve our issues. I do however feel that it should be possible to make the current set up work as well.

Our problem: The company providing Teamcenter support locally, have insisted that we use Precise only revision rules. This causes a lot of extra effort to update our assemblies when a part is revised. There is a general feeling at our company that part of the point of having Teamcenter is to have a good set of imprecise rules that make revisions work well and keep the assemblies updated.

How are other users of Teamcenter/Windchill/others using revision rules?

What are the main reasons for "forcing" us to use precise only?

We are relatively new to Teamcenter, and the support here isn't too impressive. On the top of that the first supplier of the software no longer exists and the new supplier therefore won't take responsibility for any problems. Also I am taking over for a former Teamcenter superuser that imo has questionable expertise.

So to add up, I hope to get some insight and help.
Thanks in advance

-Ane

 

[apekim]

Here are my two biggest concerns regarding Siemens support of their products:
1) Siemens will seldomly provide a straight answer regarding Teamcenter configuration and setup. If you ask them to tell you how the tool is intended to be used, you will not get a complete answer.
2) Siemens seems to make up their own terminology for functionality for mostly all products. In most cases it is not difficult to understand what they mean, but in some cases the terminology makes no sense at all.

Regarding Precise and Imprecise: First off, the terminology (precise/imprecise) stinks. I think of precise as "as stored" or "as saved". I think of imprecise as revision rule driven. The Siemens documentation is written okay, but it fails to provide really good in-depth examples on each. If your designing jet engines, then I would say that you would want to use precise all the time, so that you can have a strict control over the component revisions of an assembly revision. If you design less critical products and your manufacturing always builds the latest revision of every component, then you should be using revision rules.

According to Siemens, your global site settings need to be set to precise if you want to use a mix of precise and imprecise functionality. If global setting is set to imprecise, then you can not use precise at all. It's a real goofy terminology and understanding.

In our current scenario we use precise global setting and precise parts lists. It stinks, but since our parts do not have a status on them, we have no choice. Otherwise we would just toggle to imprecise to get the parts list up to date and then save it. Our precise parts list view is always out of date and invalid since of mfg always builds the latest released parts. Our settings may be changing soon...hopefully.

I hope this helps.

 

[Sylviane]

Hey apekim,

thanks for your reply. The possibility of using imprecise parts lists sounds interesting, and I will look into it. Why aren't you using statuses on your parts?


Best regards,

Ane
MSc Mechanical engineeering & ICT

 

[apekim]

The reason is large company politics. Our process is defined to release documents only...not parts/assemblies. It's a document centric methodology that is managed by Team center. I am pushing hard to change it though.

What I forgot to tell you is that our documents follow an alpha revision scheme (a,b,c,d) and our parts follow a numeric revision scheme (001,002,003). We use the TCRA reporting tool for operations to gather the latest released revision of items. The reporting tool first looks at the assembly view, and then finds the related latest released document for each component. this data is compiled and combined to form the report contents (p/n, revision, release status). I would NOT recommend to do things this way.