Question for the group:
1. What is your folder structure in PDM?
<vault> <customer> <order/project> <.....>
Or:
<vault> <machine type> <.....>
Or:
....?
2.How do you deal with the situation when the sales department sells a customer a machine that has already been designed in another project?
Do you not create a folder/project for the second project in the PDM?
Do you create a project and copy only the top assembly with a new designation?
Do you copy all data assemblies, parts, drawings with new names into the repeat project?
A great solution would be to insert the components as links, but this document advises against this. -> https://www.javelin-tech.com/blog/2018/10/solidworks-pdm-paste-shared/
3. Now it gets tricky, how do you manage the situation when a machine has already been sold to several different customers. And the first customer needs a change to a component that only affects his machine?
In short, with PDM, stop thinking file structure, all the stuff you mention goes on the data card so you can sort/search by any of time. File structure is like always and forever only sorting/organizing by one attribute. Stop browsing folders as quickly as you can, use the PDM Search Tool.
Folder structure only serves 1 purpose in PDM in my opinion, keep <~2000 files per directory. That is for the sake of Windows File Explorer, but even that might become less of a "limit" as Windows begins using multiple threads to load directory structures and GPUs to display them, maybe. Except for those who are lucky enough to use whatever off-the-shelf hardware an standard purchased parts and each project has it's own part numbers with no reuse of files. If their files have a known, limited life span then yeah, just copy stuff then forget about those files once the project is done.
We have serial number file names and directory structure something like:
Where the serial number folder structure has, in theory, 1000 serial numbers, which should be somewhere under the 2000 file "limit"
If you're reusing parts across projects or customers, do yourself a huge favor and stop thinking folder structure for any kind of organization, especially projects or product type or customer, those are all data card variables that can go in a list variable type. Think of it this way, imagine you have all of your CAD file attributes listed in columns in a spread sheet and all of your file names as rows; now any column that you want to sort or search by, put those as data card variables, don't let them have anything to do with the file name or folder they are in.
That's 80% of what we do, that is when the changing file(s) is/are copied using Copy Tree so it/they can be modified and assigned a new number. In our case other departments like to change part numbers now and then, so keeping the part number out of the file name helps us a bunch, we just update the data card and re-pdf the print. Updating a portion of the where used is a pain if you must change the filename. Yeah refs update, but a lot of time they don't want to update ALL where used.