Hello
I am a mechanical designer for a small structure, I am alone in the position and we have to reorganize our design office for the creation of a new range of products and the installation of an ERP.
We have our own products in our range and we also work on the deal in the field of heavy machinery. We use Solidworks.
I'd like to know how you work in your design offices, how do you reference your files, subassemblies and assemblies, whether you manage a library of standard parts with or without software, etc. ?
Thank you for your feedback,
Thomas
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Good evening Thomas
This topic came up a few times on the forum and almost invariably the answers were
that there is almost as much nomenclature as there are manufacturers and designers.
I add that you just have to look for a reference of industrial parts on the net to understand this, regular headache ;-) .
Then if you sell 1 set per year or 300 /days with an after-sales service, etc... It's not the same problem.
This type of analysis is quite complex because it must be robust to withstand changes over time.
Industrial organization is a job in itself that is often difficult to grasp in a small structure. And I know what I'm talking about because I've done information system architecture.
After that, it depends on the annual volumes of incoming and outgoing objects and the nature of the transformations.
I can only wish you good luck!
Kind regards
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I'll probably write the obvious.
The first thing is to look with a severely critical eye at the existing habits in society, to see how a deep and therefore brutal questioning of these uses will be perceived and accepted.
In my experience, I have never seen a dynamic link between CAD and ERP be satisfactory. It is better to provide a gateway that will require a bit of macro development, see below the question of PDM.
As a result, it simplifies file management.
The question of standard libraries is a double-edged sword: it's practical (you don't have to recreate it every time, it's always the same, you save space on the disks) but it's restrictive (in case of evolution).
As far as file naming is concerned, we cannot say that there is one method that supplants the others. Only the use of a PDM makes it possible to free oneself from this question as well as from many errors, allows to manage evolutions but it has a significant cost (human and financial) at least at the beginning (PDM+ERP started at the same time = big challenge).
What is the link between your own product line and the machinery business?