Our company produce products with long operation life, and customers expect to get spare parts 25 years from now. This means the Inventor data stored in Vault will need to be accessible for MANY releases of Inventor, Vault and Windows from now.
To keep data accessible and valid for operations we request creation of a function to handle update of Inventor Data stored in Vault, and to include validation of the updated data to ensure consistency.
Inventor comes with a Task Scheduler, which can check out data from a folder and update files, but it really does not fill the requirement here, as there is no validation besides an error log, and the Check in job must be created separately.
What is missing is a function running from Vault directly, creating an Update Job (Job Processor?) running bottom-up update of Parts, Assemblies and Drawings for All files/ latest/released versions.
The resulting Updated data sets should go through Validation where any issues or changes are captured. This could for parts be done by using the Duplicate Search, where any geometric differences could be identified. Similar validation should be done for Assemblies and related Drawings – to ensure a valid data set can be checked back into Vault.
There should be choice of how the data should be handled. I.e., If in released state – check files back in directly – or chose they shall they be connected to a Minor revision. There should also be choices of action available if Files are linked to Released Items.
The main point is data should be usable even if it originally was created more than 5-10 years ago, to ensure the consistency of the largest investment by customers = Design Data.
