Built-in design management capabilities in Solid Edge – what is your experience?
Maybe because I work in the marketing team my work typically focuses on the add-on solutions we offer for design management – but Solid Edge has many excellent built-in design management capabilities that help manage your designs more effectively – and this is a key area for enhancements in the ST9 release we are currently working on.
Windows Explorer integration is an important first step – while browsing folders of design data you can choose to display graphic thumbnails of Solid Edge parts, assemblies and drawings – and when you right click on the thumbnails you can open the file directly in the appropriate Solid Edge environment, and in other Solid Edge utilities such as View and Markup and Revision Manager. And if you click on the Properties option you can directly access the Solid Edge Properties dialog and edit standard and custom properties, and change the status of parts and even complete assemblies.
Revision Manager is another important utility included as a standard part of Solid Edge – and if you search on “revision manager” in this community site you will see that Solid Edge users are actively using this utility and exploring its limits! Revision Manager excels in quickly completing everyday design tasks – for example if you want to copy and rename an existing assembly while creating new revisions of some of the assembly components – this task is quickly completed. As we mentioned at SEU15, Revision Manager is an area we are working on for ST9 and I’m sure our users will be pleased at what they see in ST9 this summer.
View and Markup is another utility that is included with Solid Edge – and a slightly simpler version – the Solid Edge Viewer is available as a free download so you can make this available to any person in your organization who need to view and markup Solid Edge files. In addition to viewing Solid Edge parts, assemblies and drawings you can take measurements and create cross sections. One use of this tool is for markup of requested changes to designs – for example by field engineers or even customers who don’t have direct access to Solid Edge – and then use this markup as the basis for discussion and approval of the change by the design engineer. We also have the Solid Edge Mobile Viewer, an app for iOS, Android and Windows that can be downloaded for free from the respective app stores.
But enough from me. Which of these utilities are you using? Are they helping you manage and share your design data? What limitations do you see that would drive you towards implementing specific design management software?
