Software for electronic file data Management

[spaggioli]

My situation is this we are a small manufacturing company we produce a lot of prototype work for a large variety of customers(250 or so). As their product designers are using 3-d software we are now seeing all kinds of file types.

AUTOCAD, PRO-E , CADKEY, SOLID WORKS, MASTER CAM
for native solid models. We also have customers who will only send stupid models in IGES, STEP, STL, PARASOLIDS, and ACIS.
In 2-d we receive AUTOCAD, PRO-E , CADKEY, SOLID WORKS, MASTER CAM, DXF, DWG, IGES, PDF, TIFF, JPEG, WORD DOCS, and BMP to name most of them.

MY problem is managing all this different type of data as we are at the prototype stage with most of these
Customers, so changes and files sent are fast and frequent.

I am looking for a software solution to this problem as far as tracking the files and making them viewable and printable to all the necessary players within my company.

 

[IRstuff]

Matrix and Winchill are a couple that we've used for document management. Neither is terribly user friendly and in some cases, the documents need to be converted into PDF for viewing.

To some degree, you're almost as well off to convert to some Autocad format first.

TTFN

 

[okeng]

We use some software called Parts and Vendors from Trilogy Design to keep track of bills of material and so forth. In it, every part number can have a link to a drawing file or files and they can be any format. This is pretty handy but may not really be what you are after. It's $99 and I've set up several of my clients on it as their primary manufacturing control software.

A tiny utility program that I use occasionally is called PrintDir from widget.bizland.com it will print out the directory tree which is sometimes very helpful for keeping track of masses of different kinds of files.

Making sure everyone's windows explorer is set up to display file name extensions is another minor thing that may help if you have a lot of files with the same name and different extensions.

Jess Davis
Davis Precision Design