The company I work for has had a history of managing all the drawings for a particular project by putting them in a sub-directory where all computer files for that project are located.

For our SW files, when a a standard part is used (such as a particular motor) a copy of the original file is made from a special library folder we've created and placed in the project directory.

However, I have learned that this is a big problem for SW. SW seems to remember paths to parts that were opened in the past. Sometimes this means an assembly will open and then populate it with the incorrect part.

I've been told that the preferred method is to use PDM works... but our company really doesn't want to take on this administrative burden. An alternative is to have a common directory where all common parts are kept, and a project will refer to the part in this directory, rather than make a copy. But, we don't like this method because of the concern that someone will make a change to a part, and mess up someone else's project.


We've discussed this at length, and at the moment I am considering that we do go with the common library directory. To prevent any accidental changes to these parts, the directory will be set to prevent modifying any files. When a project is manufactured and shipped to the customer, we will use Pack-and-Go to put all the files in one directory and also add a suffix with the project's number (or a date). This way, all file names will be unique. Then as modifications or additions are made to the customer's machine, the pack-and-go version is used.

Any liabilities to the above approach?

One more thing, currently a lot of projects have deeper sub-directories for its own sub-assemblies(we've stopped that practice now). But we are left with duplicate parts at various levels of a project's directory, and this is confusing SW. I suspect that Pack-n-go will resolve some of the problems, but on the most recent one it didn't.

Before flattening the directories with pack-n-go, it seems that there were some parts in the assembly that SW didn't like. It would prompt to find the missing part, even though it opened to the exact directory where the part was. However, it would not accept the part in that particular directory, and I had to navigate to another copy of the part in a sub-directory. But, the next time I opened it the assy, it would do the same thing. Pack-n-go didn't solve this. The final solution was to delete the problem part in the original directories. But, it will be quite a task to hunt down all of these and figure out which part file SW likes.

I doubt there will be any easy solutions to the above problem.

Joe Dunfee