Useful Data Management

In your best Scottish accent - "Useful". Pronounced "Yooseghfoll" I don't know how they get the "gh" sound in everything, honestly. I will watch 25% more of a soccer match based solely on the accent of the announcer. Seriously, it's a sickness. 

Last week at our Manufacturing Tech Day for the press and bloggers, I had 90 min to demonstrate:

• Visualization Tools 
• Inventor Fusion
• Direct Manipulation and Dynamic Input
• Alias Design for Inventor
• iLogic
• Data Management

I know exactly what you are thinking. Dude...how do you close with DM? That was my thought too. Until I started to work with it. In a not too long ago life I was responsible for a program called the Manufacturing Implementation Certified Expert Program, affectionately known as MICE certification. Which meant that I created curriculum and taught classes for our resellers on how to implement Vault. I only mention this to show off how cool I was... ha! Just kidding. I mention this because I completely understand the value behind data management and document management. But as a designer, DM sometimes gets in the way, makes you slow down and actually conform to company standards for document naming, property validation and all that shtuff. (not a misspelling)

Then, the man that invented the question mark himself, Brian Schanen demonstrated Visual Data Management to me and I was blown away by how useful data can be to a designer. With Vault 2011 and Inventor 2011, you can run a report right inside of Inventor, then visually map Vault related properties to your Digital Prototype. Take it a step further and create selection sets from the report, and perform file check in, or release a design to manufacturing. What if you could visually see all the parts of an assembly that are checked out to you, or have been affected by a change order?

All of these, and whatever else you track inside of your Autodesk Vault can be visually mapped to your Inventor Models. Check out the example:

Like I said at the outset...  Yooseghfoll!

Comments

[JohnEvansDesign]

That was a sweet closing dude.