We are looking towards implimenting an ERP system with PDM. I would like to start setting up our standard library of parts and was wondering if PDM systems had a problem with configurations. For example, we have one standard part that is small (2mb) because we have multiple configurations of it. If I use the ConfigRipper tool to create individual files for each configuration I am taking up closed to 1gb. That is just one file and we have thousands with that many configurations. We were told that individual files were the way to go with PDM. Does anyone know if that is true? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Justin
My experience so far is mainly with SolidWorks Workgroup PDM, but I imagine others are fairly similar. We use configurations all the time here, and it works very well with SWWPDM. Check-in & check-out is for the entire file. You can view the properties of the individual configurations by selecting the configuration of the part. As long as you understand and accept that all configurations are always at the same revision, SWWPDM works just fine. The demos I have seen of other PDM systems also revision the entire file, not configurations.
So I say go for it.