Consolidation
Over the years of working on projects with multiple people working on the same project, it makes sense that multi-body components were restrictive on sharing with others when they were looking for work. We use single body parts in assemblies for large model management, sharing work with colleagues and speed. For this we use our own consolidation feature, which collects similar parts and compares them based on their properties and groups them. We may have components that are the named different due to their location in a project, but have the same characteristics such as weight, volume, Ixx, Iyy, Izz which means it is exactly the same part. To collect similar parts we store the part’s information in a database. The SOLIDWORKS file names do not come into play with our consolidation. We use a custom property marking system. Consolidation can be set to collect components at the top level project assembly only or Zone by Zone. A Zone is a sub assembly, used to break up a project depending on its size. For example, If the project was a mining project, There might be 3 zones, primary crushing station, Conveyor CV1, and a Screening Station. The 3 Zone assemblies reside in the Top Level Project Assembly for interface management and overall site General Arrangements.
Marking System
Our marking system works for both components and assemblies and are customizable. In such that project numbers, prefix, subfix and library codes can be used to get the results you might require.
For example: B1, 0001-B1, 0001-LEVEL1-B1, 0001-LEVEL1-BEAM-0001.
Our marking system follows the order of the components in the feature tree. Change the order and the assembly and component Mark numbers change.