Recording revision history

[mike miller]

Do you track changes in the item/part revision, or in the ECO, or both? (Let me say right away that I'm not talking about revision tables on drawings. I'm referring to recording the revision history of part XX in PDM.) If your coworker wants to see change history in 5 years for a part designed today, where will they look?

[bnemec]

Both
Where I work is a bit weird, but we keep all of our old revisions, models and drawings. All changes are documented by the ECR system in ERP. It's not very elaborate, but it contains data around the request, evaluation of the change all the required validation (testing, prototypes, etc) there is sections to assign people for approvals and actions.

[AlexB]

In our case, we use PDM so there is some history there for all part versions.

For a quick look, we also have a PDF archive of all released drawings that we can quickly look through.

Changes are officially documented in the ECO referenced on the drawing revision table. Those are also all kept as records.

[mike miller]

In our case, we use PDM so there is some history there for all part versions.

For a quick look, we also have a PDF archive of all released drawings that we can quickly look through.

Changes are officially documented in the ECO referenced on the drawing revision table. Those are also all kept as records.

@AlexB do you require use of an ECO for every revision?

[AlexB]

@AlexB do you require use of an ECO for every revision?

Yes we do

[mike miller]

Yes we do

How do ECOs work in Solidworks PDM? In Teamcenter, Engineering Orders are their own item types that contain revisions. So EO000014 has a revision called EO000014/A. This method seems odd; I'm not sure why you would want to make a revision of an EO....???

The reason I ask is because the revision history for a certain part will be scattered all across the database in all kinds of different EOs. It would be nice to always use the same EO number for a given part. That way the revision history would be cumulative, and we wouldn't need to chase EOs all over the place to figure out why a hole size was changed 4 revisions ago.

[AlexB]

How do ECOs work in Solidworks PDM? In Teamcenter, Engineering Orders are their own item types that contain revisions. So EO000014 has a revision called EO000014/A. This method seems odd; I'm not sure why you would want to make a revision of an EO....???

image.png

The reason I ask is because the revision history for a certain part will be scattered all across the database in all kinds of different EOs. It would be nice to always use the same EO number for a given part. That way the revision history would be cumulative, and we wouldn't need to chase EOs all over the place to figure out why a hole size was changed 4 revisions ago.

It's a separate process and system altogether. Each new change gets an Engineering Change number assigned and the documents are updated with a reference to that number. PDM does not house our Engineering Change documents, but it does maintain a reference to them so that we can cross reference the changes with the document in the other system.

[jcapriotti]

How do ECOs work in Solidworks PDM?

The reason I ask is because the revision history for a certain part will be scattered all across the database in all kinds of different EOs. It would be nice to always use the same EO number for a given part. That way the revision history would be cumulative, and we wouldn't need to chase EOs all over the place to figure out why a hole size was changed 4 revisions ago.

PDM doesn't do ECOs out of the box. You would need to purchase the SolidWorks Manage system that connects to PDM for process management. It didn't exist when we got PDM so we built our own ECO system inside PDM using CVD files and a number of add-ins.