Windchill 9.1 - Protection Against the "Oops" Factor
by Jim Buchanan

You're a member of a 12-person team designing an automobile drive train. You've been working on the universal joint all day, and like the otherteam members, you save your work regularly. At 4 PM your phone rings, and you learn that a change the team made at noon-reducing the diameter of the driveshaft-was based on incorrect data. The diameter was supposed to be bigger, not smaller.

The impact is extensive. Since the change affects all components along the drive train, each team member must now look back through saved iterations to find the version just before the diameter was changed, and then rebuild his or her model from that point. But there's a problem: many components have interdependencies within the entire drive train assembly, and the team members' rollbacks may throw these relationships out of sync when the models are restarted.

What's needed, and what Windchill 9.1 delivers, is a new Workspace Frames capability that automatically takes assembly-wide snapshots-that is, a snapshot of your entire workspace-with each component save, and so lets the team roll back the assembly to a point where all components were based on the original driveshaft diameter, and where all component features were in sync within the overall assembly.

To do this, Workspace Frames maintains a collection of files and an intelligent index that closely tracks and saves all data each time a designengineer hits "Save." That way, the group may find that the ideal version of the assembly, the ideal snapshot, occurred when one component was on saved-version 4; another was on version 6; another was on version 7, and so on.


Workspace frames saves different versions of your design as you go along so you can roll back changes

"The Workspace Frames capability was highly valued in Pro/INTRALINK 3.X," says PTC Product Management Director Steve Shaw. "Now that it's been ported into Windchill 9.1, it will provide a safety net to the designer who might have gone down a dead-end path of changes, or implemented a set of modeling changes that caused a model regeneration problem. With frames you can back out the changes made and revert back to an earlier more stable version of the model."

Windchill 9.1: Better data management. Extending and improving on Pro/ENGINEER data management capabilities was a high priority for the new Windchill 9.1, according to Shaw. "Strong data management capabilities are important because of the emphasis on globally distributed product development teams and concurrent design, plus the continuing increase in product complexity," he says.

In addition to the session-independent Workspace Frames capability, Windchill 9.1 adds these improvements:

* Table improvements - Tables in workspaces and common spaces become easier to operate, and so simplify data management. Windchill 9.1 permits on-the-fly column resizing; freezing certain columns to act as guides for accurate placement of new data; multi-column sorting, and selecting cells across pages.
* Data-managed associativity - This function establishes bi-directional associativity between Pro/ENGINEER files and derived-image files from non-Pro/ENGINEER sources such as Catia. "In the auto industry, this lets companies that use Pro/ENGINEER to design engines work more easily with companies that might use Catia for designing auto bodies," Shaw says. "If the Catia designer makes a change, the Pro/ENGINEER designer will receive an automatic alert."

Help for large assemblies. These and other enhancements to workspaces and frames can go a long way in simplifying complex projects," Shaw says. "If people were still designing simple models and small assemblies, these might not be so important," he says. "But today's assemblies routinely contain tens of thousands of components. One mistake can cause a great deal of trouble. Even something simple, like searching for part numbers, can get out of hand quickly. That's why a small function like multi-column table sorting or selecting across multiple pages can become critical, especially if you've got to sort out or find a few thousand parts, and you've got to do it quickly."



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