Questions About Creating an Assembly Library

[jnewon]

Hey. 

(Inventor Pro 2026, Vault Pro 2026)

I have been mulling over the creation of an Assembly Library for one of our production lines In the hopes of streamlining and standardizing our workflow. But I have questions.

 The main question. When a Library assembly or a part in that assembly is revised, how do I keep that revision from propagating thru all of my completed projects? 

For customer support I don't need revised parts in a project that didn't have that revision.

- Currently to control the project we use copy design to copy the required library assemblies to the project folder.  We do this for every project. That's a lot of copies of the Assembly library just to maintain the library state at time of build.

I love copy design. It is the backbone to our design work. But, copy design can get a bit tedious and cumbersome. I think I would like to setup a library so the designers can pull in standard assemblies directly to build their configurations. 

Also in the same breath be able to bring that library assembly in to the project folder if there needs be a modification.

Open to your suggestions, ideas, and workflow thoughts.

Thanks

jnewon

[daltonNYAW9]

You might be better off asking this question on the Vault forms, or ask if your vault provider has any solutions.

As far as your question...
We have the exact same problem. I don't believe there is an easy solution for it.

Luckily we don't have many re-producible/ copy-designed assemblies that you are talking about. So, we just copy-design everything.

One option is to utilize the "Item Master". It's for impressive ERP systems (not us). You can attach specific revisions of parts/assemblies to the Item. Again, we don't use it, but it can be used for storing job info, boms, etc.

Another option might be to create 'derived substitutes' of those specific parts/assemblies once a job is completed, but this seems like a lot of work. Manually documenting the version is a similar workflow.