Why Data Management?

I often get the question from customers asking, why they should use Autodesk Vault or Productstream. They have their way of working now and it works well for them. Well, perhaps if I can give my personal reasons why, maybe everyone reading this article will understand a little better why we try to drive our customer base to adopt data management applications.

I used to work in the auto industry, where we sometimes had to design and build production machinery in less than two or three weeks so that we could have them ready for production in a timely manner.

When working on the smaller projects that only required one engineer, we would usually work with them on our local PCs to avoid network traffic. Some of the designs we were creating consisted of several hundred files of components, assemblies and drawings. Opening large assemblies over the LAN would sometimes take a considerable amount of time and it was more efficient to just work locally.

In certain cases we would have to travel several hours to a production facility for design review, or overnight hard copies to the customers for extended conference calls. Sometimes drastic performance changes or simple esthetic changes were requested. In either case, we had no backup of the data from the time of the Design Review unless we saved the files with some intelligent naming convention including a date and creating multiple copies of the same design with differing file names.

Another issue was once our assembly concepts were complete and it was time to assign company part numbers to the components, we would have to go through and rename each of the files individually (hoping not to reuse the same part number for multiple files) in Windows, then fix the unresolved links between the files (in both Mechanical Desktop and Autocad at the time, much the same as today’s 3D environment with all of the parametric solid modelers).

Collaboration on a design had its difficulties as well, as we constantly overwrote one another’s work, undoing work, making destructive changes or losing data altogether. Some examples of these were an assembly I worked on had several automation components added. When I left for vacation, another coworker removed some necessary components by accident and had no idea he had done so. Additionally, he made changes to the drawings that would make manufacturing outrageously expensive. The only way we knew who made these serious errors was his admission of making these changes. These changes caused the project to be three weeks late and a little less than $20,000 over budget.

Releasing documents for production was a nightmare, to say the least. At the time, we had no formal release process for production, other than placing a revision letter in the titleblock. This caused a very serious problem with a project on which I worked. While I was away from my desk, my boss grabbed a drawing packet from my desk and took them with him as he was leaving to visit a vendor. The packet he took however was not for release, rather for checking. Even though I mailed a released drawings packet to the vendor, several weeks later when those parts were delivered to my shop, not one component matched the “released” drawings. Most were off by a few thousandths here and there, nonetheless inaccurate. After checking with the vendor, he built to the prints my boss delivered and not the prints I mailed. The end of the story is I had about $50,000 of metal in a crate that was worth about $2,000 in scrap.

So you may be asking yourself, how can a tier 1 company in the auto industry have so many Engineering Data Management problems? That answer is simple; we had no Engineering Data Management solution at that time that was worth the money. Knowing what I know now about Vault and Productstream, every data management issue we had while at that company would have been completely preventable.

How would our lives been different if Vault and Productstream been in place ten years ago? We simply could have used its history tracing capabilities for tracking my design history. When the time came to change back to an earlier instance in the design due to a design review, we could have had the previous history to go back to, without having multiple files stored on our hard drive or server. Additionally, our overall productivity would have increased as we would not have had to continuously travel to our production facilities for design reviews; all communication for change could have taken place in Productstream rather than in several notebooks and emails and marked up paper drawings.

Our continuous overwriting of each others’ data would not have occurred because only one person could have a design file checked out at time, and it would have been versioned and updated locally upon check out on each others machines when they needed to make changes. In the cases I mentioned above would not have been over due and over budget because of one person’s mistakes. Additionally, renaming the files from intelligent names like flywheel to corporate numbering schemes such as 50-956847, would have taken minutes rather than the hours we spent trying to reconnect the links between the files.

Had Productstream been in play at the time, we would have been able to release our documents, and publish them to SharePoint server whereby giving my vendors access to the released drawings we wanted them to have and when we wanted them to have the drawings.

Overall, It’s easy today and think of how much more productive we could have been ten years ago, had the technology been what it is today. But the fact of the matter is, we have the technology today to reduce the frustrating issues of file management, release management and change management. Now it’s all up to you to make the decision to address the following questions: