For 5 years now I have been an in-house corporate Industrial Designer. As the lead, I have been asked to work with our companies engineering management team to get my job, as well a designer that works for me, documented as part of the companies ISO procedures.
My most difficult area is file management. We do most of our work in adobe. However Rhino 3D is a part too.
I am mostly looking for version control and project file management. My current system is completely manual and vulnerable.
Is anyone using Adobe Version Cue?
What are you/your company using to manage file revision, and what are your systems benefits?
I haven’t used version cue, but I imagine that anything that allows you to 1.) check-in/check-out and 2.) tag with meta-data for easy searches would be very beneficial to you. I’ve been trying to implement something similar at my office to no avail. We have our Solidworks data databased, but it’s hard to integrate every user (even non-design/engineering users) to that system.
We use WindChill, which tags on nicely to any workflows using Pro-E. It does a good job of cataloguing versions, allows check-in, check-out, and can also pass tasks such as reviews and approvals to other users. Might work well with engineering if they use Pro-E.
Seems like a lot of the folks I talk to are wanting to do something. If it is ISO required or just sleeping better at night… If a large volume of work is coming out of the group or your design group isn’t having tons of meetings to keep up to date. Something is needed. My old company got away with nothing because their particular contract mode was short term. Meaning once the job was done… nothing else was really needed. In my current situation we have product with long-term life cycles. Different products are made with the same parts. Recalling old work is a regular around here.
Thanks folks, I will look into Windchill… sounds cool… Might be the trick. Our mechanical engineers all are on ProE. I wish I remembered it from my engineering days. The more I look into Version Cue it seems very elementary. I am not going to give up on it.
Please let me know if something else comes to mind