Using PDMLink to manage QS documents

[j0sizemore]

Are any of youusing PDMLink to manageyour Quality System documents? If so, have you created specific soft document types with their own Lifecycle and Promotions?We are just investigating at this point, and I would like to hear from other companies that may be doing this or have tried to. Benefits, drawbacks, what not to do...

Thanks in advance!

Joanna Burress

[MikeLockwood]

We manage many varied documents in addition to CAD data - some could be considered Quality system documents, although we also have a corporate system for these in general.

Most non-CAD documents use the same lifecycle and versioning as Pro/E data but some use a far simplified configuration. We have not created any different object soft types, but instead have applied the different LC and versioning, etc. via OIR in a specific context (a Library). This has worked out well. Local user permissions are also different for this context without use of soft types.

One note - you cannot move documents with a given LC to another context with a different LC - a good thing in our case but you may want to closely consider the constraints imposed by this.

Another major consideration is attributes - if you want / need to apply attributes to only to this these documents, it needs to be it's own soft type.

[DeanBarrick]

Joanna,

Yes, we aremanaging all of our Quality documents in Windchill and have passed ISO9001-2000 Certification. Auditors commented that our implementation is the best they have seen all year for managing documenation.

We chose to create a soft type under a reference document so that we could add these documents as references to other documents and parts, as well as add a few attributes

As always, Keep It Simple.

Westarted with the out-of-the box promotion process for approval and tweaked it to automate publishing to our internal viewing system since we do not use product view for documents.

We setup predefined teams of approvers and reviewers.

We use 1 library for all documents and authorization.

We use the document structure to provide a list of documents needed at each work station on the production floor.

I will try to post more later ...