I was thinking about creating our work orders through pdm. We have an existing workflow for drawings. A lot of the drawings we created have a part that needs to be fabricated. Being able to track when the part is ordered and complete would greatly benefit us so we would know when we can tell our production floor that it is ready. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to approach this or if it is feasible for pdm?
One simple way is something like this:
You can use the 'Where Used' tab to find all the work orders that contain a drawing and the 'Contains' tab to see all the documents in a Work Order. If you make transitions for the drawing with the same names as transitions for the workflow, you can see where in the workflow the drawing is at a glance.
This is by no means a complete solution but it may be enough to get you thinking.