I am looking in to using SolidWorks Tool box for a larger company. Any problems doing this with 40 SW users hitting tool box at a time? The comapny as a whole has a large problem with duplicate parts and I think this will be a way to get rid of this problem as long as i can make the part number show up in the assembly tree. (Which will be another question soon)
Yeah, I've done this in a company with 11 cad operators and it was a nightmare.
I'm not saying a large organization can't use toolbox. After 3 years of fighting with it, dumping and reloading our vault and hundreds of hours lost repairing assemblies that opened with missing fastener configurations or missing parts because someone assumed when they did a saveas and renamed a toolbox part that it would check into the vault, or just waiting for an assembly to read 50 instances of a 15Mb cap screw that loaded from the network, we finally got our setup configured correctly and the surprises sorted out.
BTW, we also implemented toolbox because we had duplicate filenames all over our datastore and when we haphazardly sucked them into a vault, they overwrote eachother and wreaked havoc on the assemblies referenced them.
What a mess man.
My advice:
1) sort out your duplicates. Get a machine with a big harddrive, dump all of your solidworks models into one folder, force external references to look in that folder and open, save and fix every assembly, renaming files that are the same name but different geometry (spring.sldprt shows up in a lot of tehse cases)
2)take some department funds and get a solidworks expert to look at your setup and write up an implementation plan that you can give to your supervisors and engineers to explain what the change is going to be. I had two guys who refused to turn on 'search file locations for external references' because it slowed down solidworks to a crawl-and then they got bent out of shape when their assemblies choked on #4 washer.sldprt.
Thanks for the replays. I am having a naming convention probem. What I am seeing is that I can change the properties and add custom fields in tool box. The one that is a deal killer for us is on the naming convention. The config name is always first. I NEED to have the part number lead the discriptions in the assembly tree. Is there a macro or some way to fix this?
Chad,
It has been a few years since I have used toolbox, but I thought I remember the option when you RD'd on the TB part in the assembly
tree where you could select "Edit toolbox properties" and you could change the config name to be a part number.
At my old job when it came to BOM part number listings this worked out fine.
Chad,
Welcome to the forum. Scott gave you some good info in both of his posts. I also recommend using Toolbox to create the parts and then save them to your network under custom names. As he said in his second post, you can then use whatever name you want for the BOM.
Chad Devine wrote:
I NEED to have the part number lead the discriptions in the assembly tree.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean here. On my screen shot the red box is the file name. If you're saving Toolbox parts to your network drive then you can use the part number as the file name if that's what you want. The blue box is the configuration used. As an example, if you use one part file for each diameter of hex head bolts and control the lengths with configurations, then you can use the part number as part or all of the configuration name.
If you do go this route and if you're using SW2012, be sure to have all users uncheck the box below, and make sure it's still un-checked after installing new service packs. It checked itself when I updated from SW2012 sp0 to sp2, but it's supposed to be fixed now.
I hope this helps, and don't hesitate to ask if you have more questions.
Glenn/Scott
Thank you for the reply. I found the solution by using your methods. The issue is creating 1000 parts and saving them as the part number and not using configurations. Configurations messes with our PDM. The part is saved in the pdm each time. There is currently no way for our pdm to not save tool box parts. Thanks again for your help.
Chad,
No there shouldn't be any issues, but with that said I would place your toolbox on the network so it can be backed up and easily accessible.
I will also add I am not a big proponent of toolbox. I have found it is better to use toolbox as a launching pad for creating your own hardware library
that can be monitored and secured so only a handful of users can modify and add to it.