File Management

Welcome to the wonderful world of PDM! You have just opened a large can of worms!

It is my experience that it is not what PDM package that you wish to go for, more what do you want this package to do? Is it PDM you are after, or EDM, or DDM, or MRP? ("an Acronym a day, keeps the experts at pay!&quot

Are you after a product to help manage the data generated within your drawing office (revision control, searches, concurrent engineering) or do you wish it to do a lot more (work flow management, engineering Change orders, links to MRP), how many engineers will be using this data? do you wish people outside the engineering/design office to work with this data, do you want people outside the company to access the data? Have you got multiple sites?

Just to make it more interesting, anyone of these questions typically leads to 10 more!

As a general rule of thumb, the solutions break down into 2 camps, the are products that look after the drawing office, such as MaxxDB, Quicksilver and products that look after the whole design process, such as SmarTeam. Go to the solidworks partner page for more products (over 20)

try and work out what you want to do and where you want to go with this information but it is important that you team up with a good reseller to help implement your ideas. unlike solidworks there is no real solution that can come straight "out of the box" you will need to work together to tailor any solution for your needs, for any reasonable implementation you can expect to pay the same costs as the product again in consultancy.

hope this helps to get you started.

demojock

Either check out comp.cad.solidworks or go to and type in that newsgroup and do a search for PDM software just for comp.cad.solidworks. This subject has been discussed A LOT!!

Hope this helps, Scott Baugh, CSWP
George Koch Sons,LLC
Evansville, IN 47714
sjb@kochllc.com