Visio Interface For Trees (Market Info)

Hi Folks,

I have been developing a Visio interface to draw family tree drawings
directly from SW assemblies. The idea is to extract directly from SW the
assembly structure and object count as well as any pertinent custom property
data. Then create family tree drawings that are hyperlinked to the objects
in SW where ever they reside on the network. You could call it a living
document of the structure.

Costed BOM's would be possible for example. Long lead items could be flagged
a different color in the tree, etc etc.

If you have input as what you would like to see in a tool like this I would
really like to hear about your thoughts and suggestions. I would lreally
like to include some of the ideas from the SW community. I have already done
the SW extraction end and pre-formatting but wanted to hear about display
formatting in Visio.

I like to refer to the idea of intelligent tee charts as "Smart Charts". I
think of it as analogous to a digital clock vs. an analog clock. With a
simple glance at an analog clock you can very quickly decipher the time vs.
a digital readout you must actually "read" it. A Smart Chart with colors and
textures or gradients would quickly convey information to the observer, i.e.
if they see a high percentage of red boxes as a ratio of the total number of
objects then one could ascertain critical path components readily. Another
take on this is to have a project manager develop the "rough" assembly
structure (major assemblies, critical parts, etc) in Visio and then "push"
the objects to the corresponding designers and engineers. Visio would create
the SW files and place them in specified directories with pre-determined
custom properties, etc. One final point since Visio is fully integrated to
SW, i.e. Visio drawings can be created inside SW drawings these objects can
be associative and interactive as well as managed by PDM systems.

Thanks for any input.




--

Guy Edkins
Delta Group Ltd
Managing Partner

Where Efficiency and Effectiveness are Fundamental

 

www.cadml.org is our XML+XSLT + Graphviz documentation project.
Looks very similar to yours (sorry)
We're looking for partnerships...

 

Guy,

I think we spoke a few months ago. I have played around with TreeWorks and
the folks liked it. Here is what I found with it:

1. TreeWorks did a good job of laying out assembly structure on a screen but
not on paper.

2. The product should be able to make drawing trees that are compliant with
commonly accepted specs for drawing trees.

3. Tying in documents "where ever they reside" will be problematic for
people using PDM, especially PDMWorks because PDMWorks uses copies on each
local machine.

4. Besides Visio consider tying in with Project. This would then allow tying
project scheduling in with what has to be done.

5. Be sure to handle special cases like Casting --> Machined Part --> Plated
Part or Uncut Bar --> Cut Bar --> Joined in Assembly Weldment or Weldment
--> Split Parts. These are all common uses for external references, some of
which don't go through an assembly.

6. Toolbox Parts/Fasteners may need to be handled differently than ordinary
part documents, i.e., a node on the tree containing a fastener list instead
of a separate node for each.

7. Two way associativity on custom properties.

 

any link on such specs please ?