Small Company PDM Options

Discussion created by TJ Eller on Oct 30, 2019
Latest reply on Nov 4, 2019 by Cad Admin

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Hi Everyone,

Our company had been using SW 2015 with the 2015 pdm and it was working great. Having the vault built into SW made it easy for our group of engineers to manage the data. There are only 4 of us.

We just switched to SW 2019 and thus, 2019 PDM (file explorer type PDM). This doesn't work well for us since we don't have a CAD data administrator. Checking in parts and assemblies is taking hours instead of minutes.

My question: are there any 3rd party CAD data management programs that are like the 2015 version of SW PDM?

Thanks!

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8 Replies

Jim Steinmeyer Oct 30, 2019 3:27 PM
I would say that you have something setup extremely wrong. Did you have your VAR assist you in setting up PDM standard that comes with SW Pro & Premium? I have used PDM at 2 companies so far and we are getting ready to set it up here as well. The last job had 15 engineers and our CAD Admin spent about 2 hours a week on it. And much of that was things like fixing formats and templates. Depending on how you setup the checkin process you could do it in less than a minute.
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Jonathan Albert Oct 30, 2019 5:47 PM
Slow performance after an upgrade can be caused by a number of issues. Since your files are an older version of Solidworks, this may be causing the slowdown. If you run a task that upgrades all of your SW files to 2019 version, you might see an improvement in performance. Contact your VAR and they can assist with troubleshooting your migration. Most users have teething issues after upgrading, see below threads:

Any issues with self-Migration of design data from WorkgroupPDM to PDMStandard

workgroup pdm to pdm standard/professional migration

Workgroup PDM to PDM Standard Migration

workgroup pdm to pdm standard/professional migration
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Guy Edkins Oct 31, 2019 6:06 PM
TJ,

The check in process in PDM is pretty straightforward stuff network wise. Where are you seeing the slow down? Waiting for the Check In dialog to appear or after you click OK. Try doing a ping to the PDM server and see what your response time is. It really needs to be less than 160 ms to keep users happy. Anything over 220 ms and SW won't support PDM issues. There are lots of things to look and the list is too large to go into here. I suggest calling your VAR and discussing it. If they don't offer any real insight we can continue this thread.

Regards,

Guy
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John Wayman Nov 1, 2019 5:01 AM
Like the others who have commented, we have found PDM Standard to be a very successful replacement for Workgroup PDM.

The release scheme we have implemented is much more successful and more foolproof than could be achieved in WPDM, too.

We did fork out some cash to have our VAR help us with the migration. Perhaps that is where your problems originate.

I would contact your VAR and ask for help before you even contemplate trying a third PDM system.

SW 2019, SP3

John
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Gordon Rigg Nov 1, 2019 7:50 AM
I working with three and occasionally 4 users (a term license for the 4th) with PDM standard and its working well.
Just a few issues like one user not realising he was working offline and creating a load of files that were then difficult to get into the vault properly.

I'm the admin and I estimate my admin work on PDM to be less than 1 hour a month.

Looking at, and use of past versions of parts from the vault is vastly superior to workgroup.

search is good.

previews are good.

where used is good

where used is available even for a particular configuration of a part/assy.

It is not creating any issues and not slowing us down. You must take care how the workflows are setup though or you can start making extra unnecessary work for users.

The only downside is the data migration from workgroup that is time consuming and/or expensive.

Our revision scheme was one that was an option in Workgroup. A-01, A-02, A-03, B-01 B-02 etc.
Its a bit ridiculous that that is a bit of a faff to setup in PDM standard, and was the major hassle with the data migration. I was left thinking that a couple of days programming work for someone at solidworks could have made my data migration a doddle, but no, the tools provided were completely inadequate.

Having done my own data migration I then found my VAR refusing to provide any support on PDM.
I contested this and we had many heated debates about it.
In the end I paid a day of consultancy to oversee my upgrade from 2016 to 2019 that included signing off on my PDM self installation (which was just a tick in a box for them as they new I'd run it without any real issues for a couple of years).

I'm sure if you have any sort of competition between VARs where you are you could get a more satisfactory outcome than I did.

Here in UK it is pretty much a monopoly with only one VAR.
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Frank Krockenberger Nov 1, 2019 2:39 PM
I am guessing that you have a vault view setup and all your files are in the vault.

When we had our VAR assist in the implementation for PDM. we had to "Get Latest Version" of the entire vault

our legacy data was scattered all over our network, so when we had our install they mimicked our

file structure on the network into the vault, and we kept all the older files in the "migrated" folder(s) then

we have new project folders for new projects. we had 63K Solidworks files, a 21meg file loads in less than a minute.

checkin/out takes a few minutes to generate the data, and a few minutes after you hit OK.

when we did our first loads, it was slower than slow until we got latest version of the vault,

depends on how many files you have in the vault, you might need to do it in sections, some of our GLV took an hour.

make sure every files is checked in first,

I do not use file explorer it does take a long time, the vault view is real quick,
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- Gordon Rigg @ Frank Krockenberger on Nov 4, 2019 7:32 AM
  There are various options in the vault view setup. We choose to cache the entire vault locally. The first time you load the vault view it takes a while to copy everything but after that it only has to copy the changes when you log in.
  
  note, however that all the files are accessible in windows explorer when you are logged out of PDM. for this reason I have the vault view on my laptop on a bitlocked partition.
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Cad Admin Nov 4, 2019 8:34 AM

TJ,

Can you elaborate the issues with why its increased so much... You upgraded to SW2019 & are upgraded to 2019 PDM, (I'm assuming SW PDM)? What has changed in you "Process" to check in items. What type of client installs were loaded in the upgrade? Contribute, Editor, Viewer? While they all will allow vault user access each has a distinct level of added functionality.

the last time i heard of such an issue it was due to someone installing/loading an Contributor license instead of a Editor.

My rules of thumb is:

SolidWorks User = Editor

Non SolidWorks User = Contributor

SOLIDWORKS PDM Standard CAD Editor	Supports working with SOLIDWORKS, DWG/DXF format, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel files. All file formats that Office plug-in handles behave in the same way in SOLIDWORKS PDM Standard except Preview.
SOLIDWORKS PDM Standard Contributor	Supports working with SOLIDWORKS, DWG/DXF format, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel files.
SOLIDWORKS PDM Standard Viewer	Allows read-only access to file vaults; user cannot add or modify (check out, check in, update values) files.

Just my 2 cents

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