Glenn Schroeder, we feel your pain.
That is annoying on so many levels:
A. Mixing words and numerals is just wr0ng!
2.000 The numerals should have been a three-place decimal.
iii. What did they have against Roman numerals!
m. Obviously this person had something against SI units.
I received this email today:
“If I was on a 450 MX bike I’d be running a 56n/mm spring- on my E bike I run a 600 lb spring.”
Not only did they switch from SI to Imperial, not only did they drop the “f” in lbf, they completely dropped the “/in” from the description of the spring. (Not uncommon, but still WRONG!) So instead of saying they are using a 600 lbf/in spring, they are saying they use a spring that weighs 600 lbm.
Investigating a SolidWorks assembly performance issue:
800 parts
90 unique
30 sub-assy
9 unique sub-assy
860 top level mates 
I was thinking, why so many mates? Fasteners mostly it turns out. There are sheet metal parts with lots of holes, some round, some hex, some key slots. The user built the parts with no pattern features at all. Just sketched 15 hexagons and cut extrude here, then sketched a coupled of key slots and cut-extrude there. Sketched some round holes and used a sketch pattern…then extruded everywhere.
Bottom line is, in the assembly, there are no fastener or part patterns, every single fastener was mated individually with at least 3 mates.
When we were just one division in the US designing a product, it wasn’t too difficult to train and herd 40-60 designers and engineers. Now that our investor overlords have taken charge, and mandated that each division in 8 countries each design a part of the new product and share those pieces, modeling standards have went to the dogs. Herding hundreds of engineers, in different countries, speaking different languages, is a near impossible task.
That sounds awful. I’m so happy that I’m a one-man show here.
[quote=jcapriotti post_id=37778 time=1731534441 user_id=91]
Herding hundreds of engineers, in different countries, speaking different languages, is a near impossible task.
[/quote]
Hang in there!
All I could think about was herding cats… :lol: I feel the same way sometimes, over 100 people in 4 countries in our PDM system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_MaJDK3VNE
In my best sarcastic dumb voice: “These computers are so slow, why don’t we buy better workstations, SW is so slow, we need better equipment.”
In my no-tact, would someone else like to be, CAD/PDM Admin voice: “If you put half a thought into your modeling the software wouldn’t be struggling to open/build your models.”
Especially when they don’t have to answer to anyone for not following the standards and purposely “buck” them because they feel their way is better and their management agrees with them.
Has this been resolved on your end? It shouldn’t be happenning, once your connection has been authenticated, it shouldn’t necessitate another authentication unless you log off. Sorry for the late reply.
We also have Authenticator around here, the only annoyance I have with it so far is the requiring authentication every time I log in to whatever, even e-mails and also, as SPerman stated, transfering authenticator because people change phones over time and need to transfer it from one phone to the other.
Nope, still the same for the most part.
I started with SDRC-Ideas. AFAIK, it didn’t have any pattern features for holes. We upgraded to NX, but we got minimal training. They sent the TeamCenter administrator to training and then he came back and reviewed the training material with us. I remember him mentioning hole patterns, but he didn’t really emphasize how powerful it was. It wasn’t until I was about a year into SW and had assemblies with 200 fasteners and 500 mates and a powerful system that told me to go get a sandwich that I realized there was a MUCH better way. I am living proof, many times over, that time invested in training WOULD have paid itself back multi-fold. Ain’t nobody got time for that. 
Have you looked with the IT guy of your company or the subcontractor who set it up? I know we have a few tweaks to do at first, but it didn’t take too long to get everything running correctly.
It’s a bit of a mess here. Everything IT has been outsourced in the last few years and since we are global, these activities are spread across multiple internal and external groups. Its difficult to find who to even talk to. I even talked with the few leftover IT guys we have locally and they just shrug and don’t know what to do either. They’ve lost a lot of the control they had over this stuff.
Current job.
When I said I need to train another designer, the boss said: “Fuck it”.
Well he’s not really the boss anymore. He sold the company.
Time for another old man rant:
When I was a kid, back in the dark ages, the school bus only stopped a few times in our neighborhood. If you weren’t standing in line when the bus was loading, you had to find another way to school. I’ve watched the bus driver pull away when a kid was a few houses away running to catch the bus.
Now, I see a school bus pull up in front of a house. The door opens, and mom makes sure johnny puts his coat on, give him a hug goodbye, a quick lecture on something and then watches him saunter down the driveway to the bus. Great, I can finally get to work. WRONG! The bus pulls forward 20 yards to the next driveway, and we get to do it all over again.
On a related note, my previous home had an elementary school in the subdivision. If you needed to come or go during drop off time, you were screwed. I watched parents who live in the neighborhood put their kids in the car and sit in line for 10 minutes so their kids didn’t have to walk 1/4 mile to school. I know our parents would be put in jail today for what they allowed us to do, but I walked a mile to school at 8 years old and lived to tell about it. (There was no snow in Atlanata, it was only uphill one way, and I wore shoes. 
)
I got some feedback from the client on one of my drawings. They want me to change one dimension from 1-1/2" to 1-9/16" to match their existing standards. I would like to have a conversation with the person who developed that standard and ask why he or she thought it was appropriate to use 16 as the denominator in any dimension involving concrete.
Give them 3 decimals.
Tell them you can only change it to mm.
like some video files 500MB in size into the vault or, before I changed the root folder rights we had entire “my documents” (or download) folders dragged inside pdm…
You guys must administer a much, much better vault than I’ve been able to manage; nobody here puts extra files into the vault willingly.
Simulation files are a PITA though. Getting users to do a pack-and-go out of the vault path to a non-vault local path is inconsistent as keeping those installations’ sim file location settings out of the vault. So much for the “seamlessly and effortlessly” doing simulation on CAD models. But at least it’s not Simulia…
I’m disappointed SW hasn’t come up with a better way to manage this, since PDM and simulation don’t play well together.