CAD Managers

[#1]

I've been a CAD Admin/Manager now for about 10 yrs now and I've seen a few people who, for whatever reason tend to think Inventor's Content Center is only for Fasteners.

Now, at a few places I've been, they had used custom fasteners due to stress or material, etc requirements and at each of these places, the direct employee (one place I was a contractor, the other place I was leaving to start my current consulting venture and was training my replacement) wanted to or had already deleted the entire Content Center library. Both stated "there's no need to keep it if we are using our own fasteners". As you all most likely know, there's a ton of useful items in CC and by deleting the entire library I feel they've greatly handicapped their users.

I have this very issue here at my current client, since they don't use basic fasteners, they went in and deleted the entire CC library, thus all the advantages of being able to use ALL the other items besides fasteners are gone. Their reasoning for this is they don't want their users using any library files that haven't gone thru their in-house verification process. Now don't get me wrong, to a point I can understand this on parts that are of critical importance such as fasteners, but what about things such as the basic shapes or as I call them, "primatives" or shaft parts, etc. I meant there's some what, 800,000 parts in CC if you load all the files.

The person responsible for removing these files won't even listen to an explaination, he just cuts you off reiterating that they don't use standard fasteners. How do you deal with this? Granted, at my current client, I'm not losing any sleep over this as I know my time here is coming to a close and if they care to continue to be ignorant to the benefits of CC for things other than fasteners, that's their issue. But I'm more or less asking how do you convince others that CC is more than just fasteners? Granted, if CC is still active, you can easily show them, I'm not able to do that here unless I bring in my personal system and that's a security issue of it's own here.

Just wondering what your 2 cents are on this.

[#2]

OK, a slight update on this....just found out that the general rule of thumb is that if a user needs a 3rd party type model (think, something that is most likely in CC), they are to download it from McMaster-Carr or the like.

I think I just cracked my skull from hitting it on the desk repeatedly.

[#3]

As a CAD Manager for 20 odd years I can see both sides of this arguement. The CC is a powerful and reliable library of parts and I tend to enforce it's use and spruke its advantages. Many people baulk at it but once they are shown not only fasteners but bearings, FG members and such they generally come around. But it does require a hell of a lot of customisation with regards to getting the existing data correct (in my case specifically talking about Australian Standard items), adding what I would call Standard content (again talking about AS content) and adding in our own content (we roll form many sections). Overall I think the effort is worth it.

[#4]

Brendan,

Thanks. I have to fully agree. I've always had the issue where you'll have custom parts that you add to CC and that's always been fine. But in this case they've deleted files in CC that they are now downloading from McMaster-Carr and Grainger or wherever they fine them. It pretty much defeats the purpose. It's like reinventing the wheel.

Now, I can understand removing CC parts you know you won't use such as say you only use ANSI standard parts, well, then feel free to get rid of or don't load the ISO, DIN, JIS, etc parts.

I guess I've been so customed to using CC files over the years (saving me tons of hours), I just don't get throwing the baby out with the bathwater.