CAD Forum

Good day to you all, I'm finally back, after my old company sent me away due to outsourcing quite suddenly.

After all those sheet metal problems (I will write an update fairly soon on those), I'm now with a company, that uses PDM and we would like to lock some parts with a freeze bar and change custom properties to be standardized across the parts.

1. Does it make a difference to freeze vaulted parts for the rebuild speed with a PDM system? Most parts are not checked out and are locked into the vault anyway. Or am I wrong here?
2. How can I change custom properties to look like

   Code: Select all

   "SW-Material@@configname@partname.SLDPRT"

   ? Is the only way a macro or do I have other options?
3. The BOMs here are basically done manually and we would like to automate things better. Any literature/courses/videos on this regarding PDM? Any additional best practices on how to deal with different materials from different vendors properly (shape stays the same, material changes, maybe thickness a bit, color changes....)?

1. Using the freeze bar in SOLIDWORKS is different than having a PDM vault and the file locked (checked in). Just because the part model is not checked out does not mean that SOLIDWORKS will not rebuild the model in SOLIDWORKS (especially if you select Ctrl-Q on the keyboard. From testing a few years ago we found that "freezing" part models does make a difference in large assembly performance. A few of our customers have made Freeze a requirement for releasing part models.
2. The only ways I can think of to change existing files in PDM is manual (check out and open each file) or programmatically. It's a pretty simple macro and it can be automated within PDM Pro.
3. BoM's are still the "wild west" in PDM, seems every company just finds a way to get it done. Part of it depends upon PLM or MRP or manual, etc...
Have you ever looked at OpenBoM?

@TomCote45

Sorry for this late answer, I didn't see yours!

Thank you for that clarification, we'll add freeze to all our vendor parts then.

Something additional I learned from @Alin :
It has NO effect on rebuild times of an assembly actually. So it's more of a locking mechanism & to speed up when working with configurations.

For some trouble we had in the past Freeze bar is disable on our installations.