embedded drawings

[joebk]

We typically have 2 different product categories where I work. Product we sell to many customers ("standard" products) and highly customized products either specially designed by us or our customers.

I have been making the argument that when the customer designs a product we should embed their drawing onto our title block. My main reason for this are as follows...

1) revision control - we can always tell what revision of the customer print we are working to
2) reduced problems with drawing mismatches between us an customer (sometimes these errors are very costly!!!)
3) the customer (should) get what they want

I am getting a lot of resistance mainly because of historical processes (this is the way we have always done it, etc).

In the past we created our own drawing and model structure for these parts. In some cases this resulted in extremely costly problems because of engineering changes and drawing differences. Not to mention that when customers design a part in inches and we convert to mm there are ALWAYS issues with rounding.

Is what I am proposing accepted in the manufacturing industry? I have seen in at other places and some customers of ours do this but I thought it would be good to get a broader spectrum of opinions.

I am looking through the ASME Y14.100 and cannot find anything that I think specifically refers to this situation. I am looking in section 8 of the standard (ironic that this would be section 8!). Am I looking in the wrong place?

Thanks in advance for your help!!

 

[KENAT]

My last company did much of its manufacture to other peoples drawings. And we did drawing custodian services for various government offices which all had different formats etc. without too much trouble.

If the customers drawings are adequate to manufacture to then I would have thought creating your own drawings in any form should be avoided if possible. What is essential though is a list of the revision of all the drawings in the pack. The drawings packs at my old place had a 'drawing list' as part of the pack, this was a list of the rev of all drawings in the pack. This was essentially the controlling document of the pack in many cases. If the customer doesn't give you this list then you could maybe create it and in your bid say that the drawings to be manufactured are the following rev. Any changes of rev from the customer should then be changes to the purchase order. The only problem I remember having was when we did some license manufacturing for a major US defense contractor. Their list of what revs the drawings should be didn’t match the drawings they’d sent us, I don’t think we’d resolved that one before I left my last place.

The only times we'd re-create drawings was if the original drawing wasn't adequate for manufacture, then we'd create our own drawings. In this case we'd usually make it clear to the customer this is what we'd done and get them to approve the new drawings if need be.

Also at my last place we worked about 50/50 in metric and inches, depending on customer, what units any previous related drawings were or what units it's mating equipment was in. We rarely converted, out of interest why are you forced to convert?

I’m unclear what advantage embedding their drawing into your block gives, why not just use their drawing?

 

[joebk]

I should have mentioned that when we embed the customer's drawing this includes the title block, border, and all other information contained on the drawing including logos, etc.

Unfortunately a lot of our business practices are historical and not based in reason - that I know of. At some point the edict came down that "everything was to be drawn in mm". Now this has become SOP so I am SOL in most cases. I am still attempting to negotiate to allow inch and mm drawings because this procedure has cost us some serious cash and business in the past.

Typically we embed the drawing so that we can apply our own drawing number and part number to the item(s) for internal control. In addition, we might make notes (not on the embedded drawing) for our own purposes. This allows us to tie all of this information onto a single drawing and still display the customer's information on our drawing.

 

[ctopher]

To embed a customer's dwg onto yours can create legal issues. Also, you never know when their dwg is revised. It is good practice to leave it off and have a system in place for QA and Inspection to check against the customer's dwg.

Chris
SolidWorks 07 3.0/PDMWorks 07
AutoCAD 06
ctopher's home (updated 04-21-07)

 

[sbozy25]

My last company forced this issue. We worked with a bunch of other supplier and customer drawings, but they used a different part number system. So, since our management team was to.... well lets just say ignorant.... they argued that our doccument control would be a mess and that we would never be able to find drawings when we needed. So they wrote a policy that if anyone received a drawing that was not done by us, we were required to drop it (title block and all) into our title blocks with one of our part numbers. That way no one would be confused while looking for a drawing.

 

[ewh]

We make composite parts. Many of our customers provide a drawing and a solid model representing what they want. Unfortunately, the models seldom accurately represent what the final part will be (due to inherent manufacturing issues), so we remodel them and create our own drawings. We then reference the customer drawing no. in our drawing notes. We have no need to include the actual customer drawing in our drawing (since their drawing and ours are VERY similar). Often, we have to re-configure the GD&T to something legit and attainable, so including the customer drawing would only add confusion.