I wonder if Audodesk has a plan to add capabilities such as branch/merge and comparison similar to OnShape in the future to Vault/Inventor.
Branch & Merge in CAD Design
If this capability is added to Audodesk Vault/Inventor,
- It will save lots of time for communicating the design changes other designers/analysts/project engineers and do not miss sharing the details of the design changes.
- It will allow tracking and showing design changes visually from a selected date which will give much better understanding of the changes that a user wants to know from.
- It will allow to have branches of designs to perform a design exploration study concurrently and merge back for a successful design.
With current capabilities of Vault and Inventor, if a designer modifies design of parts and assemblies and then check-in, the workflow that other people can know what the changes would be:
a) Reading the check-in comments for each part and assembly file if it is not blank and well described.
b) The designer who modified the design notify and show the changed design to all other people who need to know.
c) Loading old and current version of Inventor models in two separate computers and comparing them since Vault can have only one version in a local computer.
Current workflow with the current Vault/Inventor capability, there are high possibility for:
1) Other people may miss the design changes for every little part design changes. Although Vault shows red circulating arrow icon, it does not tell the detailed changes.
2) Although the designer communicates to show the changes, if something is missed in that communication, then it will be lost.
3) It is hard to input and track all Vault comments when a group of parts and assemblies were checked-in.
