For those who use PDF as a production drawing, do you keep revisions of these?

We are working on converting our existing SolidWorks and Cakey drawings
to PDF to use a the production drawing. We have around 8,000 of each
type. Im curious to know if most people simply write over the old PDF
when a new revision of the SolidWorks drawing is generated, or do you
keep revisions of your PDF files also? The easiest solution seems like
the first solution, but having older revisions in PDF format would be
helpful at times (but this can get messy and be more work).

What does your company do?

 

Sounds like a good way to do it. We are starting a "paperless" project
here, to stop using paper travelers and drawings in our shop. Issues of
making only the current drawings available are critical. We haven't
decided on the file format yet. We're a job shop, so many of the
drawings are from customers. We'll scan those, probably to tif, and
then the SW and Acad files may get displayed as pdf or edrawings.

I like the approach of a vb program handling your file rev's and
storage.

Thoughts or advice on going "paperless" from this group are very
welcome.

Diego

 

We evolved from AutoCad to Solidworks here.

The AutoCad versions were saved with the revison at the end of the file
name. (-RA)

We have converted all of the existing AutoCad drawings to PDFs and all
new SolidWorks drawings are saved as PDFs also.

We have a hick-up.

We want our MRP/ERP software to have the ability to link to the PDF
file and open Acrobat Reader for viewing. Therefore the drawing number
entered in MRP/ERP database must be the same as the file number. In
order to keep it simple we plan on taking the revision suffix off the
PDFs and make sure our revisions are recorded throughly.

I'd ask yourself these questions:

How often do we need to access an old revision?

Do we stock parts under the revisons?

Is the lastest revision "backwards compatable? If not do we need to
change the part number?

 

What ERP system do you use? We have Mapics, and are using some
software that manfacturing calls "Paperless", which part of the program
name, not the system. They have the same issue, the filename needs to
be the same as our Item number.

Im going to ask about the wildcard. If the wildcard is ?.pdf, what if
you have 123A.pdf and 123B.pdf?

 

This is the route I'd take.
When a new revision is approved copy and rename the "active" revision
to a older folder and append the revision to the filename.

Thus, the latest ERP link will always be to a specific path that
contains the latest approved PDF (No file revision in filename). No
need to modify the link each time a drawing is released to production.

Len

 

We keep the pdf files in our PDM system as well as the SolidWorks files. The
pdf files all have the same name, no revisions, and you can find the old
ones when you need to.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

We create a pdf of our SolidWorks drawings at ECO release. Our poilcy
is that the SolidWorks Model, Drawing and the pdf must be at the same
revision level at release. This makes it easy to tell what is approved
for production. The last pdf is approved and the SolidWorks data with
the matching revision level is approved. Any revisions beyond the pdf
are not approved yet. We attach the pdf file to the solidWorks Drawing
in our PDM vault so one appears below the other. The SolidWorks data is
in an Engineering area of the vault that production can not view, The
attached pdf actually resides in a foldered that production can has
read access to.
The ISO 9000 auditors love our system, it is easy to tell what to
manufacture to and it is difficult for production to get to anything
but the approved drawings. The other nice thing is that production has
24 hour access to approved drawings.
Brad Harding

 

Thanks for all the replies so far.

For those who dont put the revision in the PDF filename, how do you
tell what revision the drawing is without opening it up?

 

If you used DBWorks PDM it would automatically create and control the PDF's
so that the most current solidworks drawing would have a matching PDF
guaranteed..

 

Is anyone using tif, edrawings, or a format other than pdf for
production drawings?

 

We thought about doing eDrawings, but the PCs on the shop floor and
some of our vendors and customers didn't have enough power on the to
handle some of our large eDrawings.

Some of our customer's ISP mail servers wouldn't allow the large
eDrawings through.

 

If you access the drawing from inside the PDM system, it shows you the
revision, depending on how you get to the file. If you are just looking at
the file itself, you have to open it. If we weren't using the PDM system,
then I would be inclined to put the rev in the file name.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

Our current PDM system gets the revision from the revison custom
property. Since PDF files dont have custom props, how does your PDM
system handle this? Our PDM system does have "Versions", but these are
not meant to be the revisions, just a version handled by the PDM system.

 

Our system (ProductCenter) has both versions and Revisions for all the
files, including pdf files. Version is a system property and increments each
time you check a file in. Revision is a property the user can manipulate,
within limits. Since many people get confused by the two, we've started
hiding the version from most users.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"