Tabulated vs Detabulated 2

[MadMango]

I'd like some insight from people that work in a multi-user environment on how they handle drawings of items that are tabulated. My company continues to flip-flop between tabulated and de-tabulated drawings. In the AutoCAD days, everything was tabulated. When we switched to SW in '97 it was decided to de-tabulate drawings due to being "scared" of configurations and the multi-user environment (and unfamiliarity with SW). During '00 they tried to revisit tabulated drawings, but ended up manifesting their fears, creating a lot of confusion and going back to de-tabulated drawings.

Now it's '05 and the company finds itself with SW05 SP4 (probably skipping SW06 as they did with SW04), and once again toying with the idea of tabulated drawings. I'm trying to avoid past mistakes, reinventing the wheel, and under utilizing SW. I'd like to know what methods and successes others have had.

Some examples of our parts that could benefit from tabulated drawings:
hydraulic hoses
expanded metal mesh panels
structural tubing
hardware
ring terminal-terminated wires
weldments (for S, M & L products)

Thanks all, looking forward to your posts.

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[drawoh]

rgrayclamps,

You are right. I am working with a disfunctional PDM system. It is a nice pretty database. It obfuscates mechanical design data, and it provides poor support to manufacturing and sales. I can see ways the database could have worked, but it was not implemented that way.

What dumb ideas went into this thing?

SolidWorks models can be used as an ERP database. They (mostly) represent real parts. The profile cards can be used to populate the database fields. Of course, database people know all about mechanical design.

SolidWorks is a mechanical design and documentation tool. If you optimize it for non-mechanical tasks, you mess up mechanical design. There was probably a better tool for that other task, anway.

In ERP (or MRP), the objects in the database are physical parts, not documents or CAD models. It is important not to get confused. The part numbers you read off the drawings are all ERP needs to know about. If your part numbers are based on document numbers, you know what document you need.

Mechanical design automation is a very limited technology. It works really well when a company builds one-off similar system based on a small number of design criteria. Our VAR claimed that such a customer increased his productivity by 800%. Most of my stuff is not automatable.

If I run into an automatable problem, I will solve it within SolidWorks. The PDM, ERP and MRP provide me no usable resources.

JHG