One of the big benefits of a PDM solution is that it makes it easy to find and reuse parts. Part reuse can save your team hours of work and help you finish new projects weeks earlier. In order to reuse a part you need to find it, though, so part reuse depends on really strong search capabilities. Today we’re happy to announce that GrabCAD Workbench now offers one of the most flexible part search tools in the industry.
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Many new designs contain parts that can be reused from previous designs, but if you aren’t using a CAD file management solution it can be very difficult to find the parts you’re looking for. Sometimes you may know the part number, but other times you might be searching based on material, description, date of creation, or some combination of those attributes. GrabCAD Workbench now allows users to search for a wide variety of file properties, including both standard properties like name and author, as well as custom properties like material and description that you may have associated with a file.
The most obvious example of part reuse is common items like bolts or washers, but part reuse applies to more complex parts as well. For example, if you’re designing a new custom flange, you might want to look at all the flanges your team has made in the last year, or only flanges made of aluminum, or flanges made of aluminum that weigh less than 1 kg. When you find the best flange, you make a couple of quick modifications and add the new part to your assembly. Time saved: hours. This search capability works across all major CAD file types, so even if your colleague is using a different CAD system you can still find that part he created last year.
How to use/set custom properties
Getting started is as easy as opening up the Custom Properties from the right-hand panel. You can find more detail here:
http://help.grabcad.com/article/95-search-and-custom-properties
Supported CAD systems
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CATIA
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Solid Edge
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PTC Creo
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Autodesk Inventor
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SolidWorks
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STEP
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NX
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IFC
We're still hard at work testing other systems.
We hope that this flexible custom property search tool helps Workbench users save even more time in the design process - let us know if you have other ways we could expand our search tool to help you!
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