Hello
I work in a design office with SolidWorks. We design around 200 products, each with many configurable options. Some options are incompatible with each other, and each product can also be available in several colors.
Our PLM tool (Visiativ) will be deployed soon, which gives us the opportunity to structure our product architecture from the outset in a clean, scalable and efficient way.
In this context, the use of SolidWorks configurations is to be avoided, as it greatly complicates exchanges with Visiativ PLM.
We also have the My CAD Tools package.
We are therefore studying two main approaches:
- A 150% blend, containing all possible variants, to be filtered afterwards
- A modular architecture, with only interchangeable sub-assemblies, and on-demand assembly generation according to the options chosen
I am looking for feedback on these approaches, in particular regarding CAD maintenance, screw management, creation of assembly plans, and integration with a PLM.
If you use another method to manage complex and configurable products, I'm also interested in your feedback.
Thank you in advance for your advice.
Hello;
We don't currently use PLM in our company, so I couldn't give feedback to help you (sorry 
).
On the other hand, I am deeply and negatively surprised by the sentence:
… I know that Configuration management is not Visiativ's strong point (they remain on their premise of managing the configuration options in " hard " in the options of their own tools, which is often problematic).
But I would like to know more about what led you to this conclusion and why a PLM would not have been able to accommodate a few hundred configurations...
So, I'm also interested in the feedback from this product.
See also for other PLM vendors/software that are compatible with Solidworks.
Note: @tdubedout , you did not specify the Solidworks version used, and in the age of 3Dexperience (3Ds platform) full Vs Solidworks Local this notion is no longer trivial.
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Hello
@Maclane , configuration management in a PLM/PDM is normally prohibited because 1 reference = 1 file
The configuration file, if one of the references evolves, it is difficult to manage if there are associated workflow statuses.
For the moment, we can overcome this by managing the screws as a library element that is not backed by workflows. On the other hand, in case of a change in the index on one of the references (or the addition of a reference to one of the configurations) it is a bit complicated because you have to generate a file version and update all the use cases.
Replacing the version allows you to overcome this problem a little but the simplest would be to have one file per ref.
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Hello @Maclane and @Cyril_f, thank you for your answers, or rather questions! 
Currently, we had a system to manage the different surface treatments with configurations:
A config per finish → no change in appearance on the part, only custom properties related to the config that change.
Visiativ first told us that VPLM doesn't like to manage configs and that the surface treatment part could be more easily managed directly in PLM, because you create a neutral file in CAD and create color variants in PLM.
As @Cyril_f says, where it gets complicated is for the options part, because there are multiple options that can each have several choices. And there, we quickly rise to several dozen possibilities of finished products.
Digging a little deeper, I saw that DriveWorks Express could create assemblies from forms. But how do you manage this multitude of data afterwards?
As for our software, we are on SW2024 SP5.0 locally
The question is not simple, the scope of the subject is vast and this is only the beginning!
Hello
OK.
As a result, the drawings no longer provide all the information necessary for manufacturing and an additional document with the item's attributes must be generated and maintained. It still remains to be decided on its form for communication with the supplier.
Question, how do we know what state of finish the part is used in an assembly?
Hello @Silver_Surfer ,
From what I understand, when creating the drawing in PDF format, you can add a table to the plan with the surface treatment data from the PLM.
We don't know, we manage it in the PLM.
Other questions:
Concerning the first point, how can we distinguish/understand how it works if all the options are present with certainly incompatibilities between some of them?
There is also the problem of ground properties: if we can refrain from using configurations in favor of display states to visualize different product designs (we hide unwanted options), the mass of a hidden component is taken into account. We will always have the mass of a " 150% " product! Only configurations can handle the deleted/undeleted state of a component, and therefore different mass properties for the whole.
Regarding the second point, this solution implies the implementation of complex and rigorous design methods when it comes to verifying the interconnection of subassemblies. How do you proceed, or how do you plan to proceed in this case?