Hi,

i've got a serious doubt about how to proceed and i sincerely hope you can help me. Sorry in advance for my english!

From june i work in a new company, the typical firm with small brains but with enough profits. They asked me to work with them because they need someone that knows Production processes and i'm quite expert in Lean Production, EPDM and SAP. Unfortunately at the moment they don't have both EPDM (maybe next year, the said) and SAP, cause they assembly, they don't directly produce.

The Technical Director (the Deus ex machina of the company) goes on in asking to the Engineers to code everything with a crazy 18 alphanumeric significant part numbering system, where you have to specify also the color variants. During last days we had some problems: in fact, i go on in saying that it's useless to work in this way, because it's dangerous, especially for a PDM implementation. Too many details, too many problems in the future, and i need to find a solution that gives him the idea to have the control about everything as usual (i prefear to manage the color variants at ERP/MRP level, but the Technical Director doesn't want to give the).

According to you, there's any way to manage the color variants in Solidworks at assembly level? For example defining a color property for a part for each assembly configuration? Or, what you can suggest, in order to avoid having parts with a configuration for each color variant (and with a 18 long code for each of them)?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Cristina