topic Re: Managing Competing Design Variants in Vault Forum

Managing Competing Design Variants

dylanTEV9W — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 15:29:10 GMT

Hi all,

I'm curious to know what others are doing to manage projects with multiple competing design variants in Vault. The product that I'm actively developing has reached a point where two competing variants are being actively developed at the same time. Only one of the two versions will ultimately go to manufacture. Is the best way to deal with this just to create a copy of the part file for each variant that is being actively developed and then shelve all unused variants once one is chosen for manufacture? Ideally I would use a branch like git has, however that feature isn't supported in Vault right now. I'm curious to know how others with more experience than me handle this sort of situation in Vault.

Thanks,

Dylan

Re: Managing Competing Design Variants

swalton — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 20:30:18 GMT

We use independent top-level assemblies for each design. Any parts or sub-assemblies that have the same-form-fit-function can be reused. Anything that needs to be different is Copy-Designed with Vault and then replaced in the proper top-level assembly.

Some folks use a method like different part numbers/filenames or Lifecycle states to identify the in-production version at the end of the development process.

I suspect it would take a complete re-design/new program to make Vault understand and merge design variants. Inventor might have to be re-written too.

Re: Managing Competing Design Variants

CGBenner — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 10:46:31 GMT

@dylanTEV9W

I like the copy design method as well, and one thing I would caution (because I ran into it at an old job), is to keep the competing part files in separate locations, with different file names, and make sure everyone knows the system. In an old job, we ran into a situation very similar, where they simply copied the part over and over and used the same file name. Some of the parts didn't actually end up changing geometry. So,... in the final design assembly, sometimes the correct part was not used, and to make it worse... the part which was used for the final fabrication drawings was not the one used in the final assembly! So years later when we went to change a shaft, for example, those chnages were NOT in either the assembly or the shaft drawing that went out to the vendor! Only then did we figure out that the shaft part lived in six different locations. It took a day to figure out which of those was used in the drawing, and which was in the assembly.... opening that can of worms ed to nearly three months of cleaning up these prototype folders and designs, and archiving dozens of unused copies! My head is spinning just thinking about it.

Re: Managing Competing Design Variants

swalton — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 13:27:57 GMT

@CGBenner

One of the great joys of Vault is the "Enforce Unique Filenames" setting. Add the Numbering Schemes in the paid versions of Vault, and one never has to double-entry part numbers/filenames in Inventor and an external database.

As I'm sure you know, enabling that prevents the issue you describe with the same filename used for different geometry. I suspect that your former company had disabled that setting. What kind of workflows did you have where it was helpful to allow duplicate filenames?

Re: Managing Competing Design Variants

CGBenner — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 13:37:15 GMT

@swalton

When I became the Vault admin, that was the first setting I enforced. The situation I described had occurred years earlier, in the infancy of Vault. At the time it was being used as a simple check in/check out system. I don't think those who were doing these prototypes could foresee the problems it would create down the road. It was discovered when a designer opened a part from the assembly to make a simple change, and then opened the part drawing to add the revision... only to notice his change was not there. The part file inserted into the assembly was not the same one from which the drawing was created. Looking deeper it was found that the same part file, with the same name existed in six different locations. Once the rabbit hole was discovered, it took months to get everything straightened out. Since those days, unique filenames and copy design became our good friends.

Re: Managing Competing Design Variants

dylanTEV9W — Wed, 31 Mar 2021 21:03:24 GMT

Thanks for sharing, I like the idea of independent top level assemblies. I still wish I could have separate branches for different design variants of parts but I understand that this is a technical limitation of how the Vault was written. I'm holding out hope that Autodesk could add this feature at some point in the future.