Dealing with large libraries of 3rd party parts general organisation

[j_w_12]

I'm on a placement at an engineering company at the moment and have been tasked with sorting out their (messy) parts library. There doesn't seem to be any naming convention or much of a logical file structure.

I've gone through existing designs and pulled out any off-the-shelf parts that look like they could be reused in future.

They use lots of 'families' of parts regularly so building some iParts for them too.

Once of the problems they seem to have is when people download off-the-shelf parts in a 3rd party file format (Inventor ipt not available) no one bothers to fill in the iProperties and sort in any kind of logical folder structure (they use vault btw...).

Looking for any input/links/blog posts etc in the broad area of data management that might apply.