Inventor Vault PDM PLM interface

[matthew.veivers]

My company is at the early stage of doing a feasability on various PDM/PLM systems.

Up for consideration is SolidWorks EPDM, Windchill, Agile, TeamCenter and Vault Professional.

Our company has recently become a multisite organization due to a meger.

All sites only use Inventor. No site currently uses any form of the Vault.

Before they started consideing other PDM/PLM sytems my intention was to use Vault Professional across the sites. 

My questions are

1) Is it recommended to have some form of the Vault installed before the introduction of a non AutoDesk PDM/PLM. Or does the vault now become obsolete.

2) I have read in other forums about the problems associated with letting these other non AutoDesk applications control the Inventor files. In particular "Derived parts", "Shrink wraps", i-assemblies, i-parts and content centre. Has anyone had these issues.

3) Does anyone any plm forums that would reply to this post.

Regards

Matt 

[olearya]

Hey Matt,

There are a few gotchas with implementing a 3rd party system to manage Autodesk CAD applications (and as you can imagine vice versa).

Historically issues you will likely face are:

"rev lock" where your PDM system does not build an add-in for the CAD system for 6months to possibly years after the Inventor release.  This means you cannot upgrade our CAD tool to take advantage of new functionality and subscription benefits.

Another version of "rev lock" is when your company cannot afford to upgrade a much larger, more complicated PDM system - typically the CAD guys are the poor cousins in this deal and will get stuck on old CAD tools or have to work outside the system.

As you point out there are issues with more complicated relationships, we have made great steps recently in better support for suppressed parts (Level of Detail), iparts etc and are committed to improving the interaction.  Many other systems can't manage these file or relationship types meaning more manual process' to manage files.

Finally just ease of use becomes a factor - if the PDM system is not tightly integrated with CAD and hard to use we find the CAD users will find an easy way, not using the system :).

So my suggestion would be to look at setting up a Vault and planning your PDM landscape.  WIth Vault Professional, I imagine that you would look to connect each of your sites using replication and start to bulk load relevant design data which depending on the volume of your legacy data and strategy can be a big task.

You should then be able to work on the process of connecting Vault with any other business systems the company uses (ERP, PLM etc) to pass over the required metadata / files for use outside of the engineering department.  

If you haven't already looked at the Autodesk PLM solution I have included the link below to PLM 360:

http://www.autodeskplm360.com

Hope this helps!