Keeping the overview of your product designs and files can be quite a task. And not an easy one. Collaboration on design work is not only beneficial but necessary. Everyone brings their best to the table and lift each other with their strengths when developing products. But it also risks complicating things. It quickly becomes difficult to keep track of adjustments and development. Who did what when? What is done and what is pending? We need tools that not only enable design and collaboration – but also helps us keep an overview of our projects and keep track of changes. Let’s have a look at how we can simplify this process.
For a competitive company, it is vital for its management and employees to stay informed on the status of projects. And it’s important that information is easily accessible and can be viewed in meaningful ways for all interested parties.
The cloud-based platform, 3DEXPERIENCE, offers not only all needed tools for design work and collaboration but several really nice functions to access and view information as well. These functions help you stay up-to-date on the data that your company is currently working on, as well as what data has been delivered historically, and what changes are waiting to be implemented in a product.
Options for all content and file formats
In short, you can quickly access a lot of information in any kind of content and file format, whether it is 3D-data, MS Office documents, PDFs, or other files.
Files can be previewed and interrogated in different ways, and you can compare a document with other revisions and do markups, just to mention some of the functions.
When you have reviewed the content, you can respond to the correct user or group by either commenting directly on the content or you can create a markup that can be posted to your company’s community on the platform and shared with your team.
Read more: Optimize your project planning and save precious time
Meaningful visuals with color codes
Today, we are going to look at how to view critical information quickly from a model using colors. Using out-of-the-box functionality, you can color-code metadata on the different components of your product, and this visual analysis enables you to access important information fast. It is easy to set up, and easy to use.
In the image above, we are looking at an assembly containing about 300 parts. These parts have different states, reflecting where they are in the product lifecycle at this specific moment in time. Some of the parts are in the Released state, some are in the Work state and some are Frozen, a state indicating that something is awaiting approval.
The colors let you quickly view what components are in what state. You can hide/show components or explode them and look at individual parts if you want. You can also section the assembly to get a better look inside – all of the interrogation tools you might want to use on a 3D model are available right here.
I have set this up using the tagging functions on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, which lets you specify what you see on your screen, as well as the way you see it.
In the 3D Play widget, where you can preview files, you can also filter out content or apply certain color rules on metadata as in this case shown on image above.
Read more: Q&A – 20 Things Worth Knowing about PDM on Cloud
Collaboration made easy out-of-the-box
These functions are available out of the box and only requires that a product is uploaded to the platform, e.g. from SOLIDWORKS, by a user who has the permission to do so.
Anyone else in the company who can see the data, can interrogate the model to stay informed on any changes – or as in this case – see the status of each component. If you want to include external stakeholders in your project, you can do that too, as licenses can be lent out outside the company.
All the functions you see here are available on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform provided by the set of tools in the Collaborative Industry Innovator role. Uploading the SOLIDWORKS files requires the tools of the Collaborative Designer for SOLIDWORKS role.
You get all the tools you need for design work and collaboration along with functions that will help you keep an overview of your product data and keep track of adjustments and development not only within but also outside of your team.
Having this kind of functionality gives you more information about your data than traditional tools. It keeps your project members informed, lets you make informed and better decisions and overall it minimizes the risk of design errors.
Would you like to know more about the functions and tools offered by the 3DEXPERIENCE platform? Then don’t hesitate – reach out and we’ll help you.
Innovate in real-time
How can manufacturers connect team members to get them to interact and innovate in real-time. Get the answers in this e-book!
