Ron - Wednesday, February 27, 2008 2:39 PM:
Our practice has been to keep the drawings and Parts at the same revision level for custom made items.In several cases we have found the need to make changes to parts which have no effect on the drawing (i.e adding a new AML or linking another related doc.) in order to do this the part gets rev'd up and we are forced to include the drawing on the ECR/ECN, to keep it's revision updated.
Another example might be where we have a drawing of a part which has variants (color, size) if later on we add a new variant to the drawing (drawing gets rev'd up) and the new part starts off at Rev A which is now out of sync with it's supporting drawing.
We have had many discussion in house on this issue of keeping the parts and doc revisions the same, is it really needed? And we are split on this topic.
What are other companies doing?
Is there a standard practice to which industries follows?
Pro and Cons of each
One thought looking forward, if we were to adopt a practice of not having BOM's on the drawings and having the item numbers (balloon numbers) on the drawings reference the sequence numbers in Innovator's BOM, this could reduce the maintenance required for drawing updates. In this case the Parts in Innovator would have different revisions then the supporting documentation. Yet we also have a requirement to include the revision of the part on some labels that are affixed to the products, of course this would have to be the revision of the part and not the supporting documentation. Now if this product is subbed out to third party vendors, who would build according to the documentation, yet told to mark the product a different revision would this cause confusion?
I am sure there are others out there who must be dealing with similar issues, and I am looking to hear from you. What are you doing?
Thanks
Ron
playton - Monday, April 14, 2008 5:04 PM:
Ron,
We chose ARAS Innovator as a CM II compliant tool. This is the best business practice we could find for information and change management. See www.icmhq.com for more info.
CM II doctrine not only states there is no need for document to part number matching, but that the part number doesn't actually carry a revision at all. The part "revision" is actually the set of its defining documents at a given point in time - and that needs no revision, but a definition of the BOM, drawing, and process plan against that part.
I knew nothing of CM II a year ago, but now that I'm certified and put it into practice, I've gotta say that our ARAS launch of just the change process has been a success.
You can also buy a book on the subject by Vincent Guess.
Good luck,
Paul
playton - Wednesday, June 11, 2008 5:59 PM:
Ron,
I would suggest using the CM II compliant change process that has a Fast Track (low burden, rapid, easy) path and document the change. Also, CM II would say NO WAY to the link of a drawing revision to an associated information set revision. I can e-mail you the selling points on the CM II point of view if you'd like.
Best regards,
Paul
Ron - Thursday, June 12, 2008 9:08 AM:
H Paul
Thanks for you replies, I did take your advice, Parts no longer have to be in sync with the revision of the documents. After thinking about this it only makes sense that parts are allowed to have different revisions.
I have re-written our Quality Procedures for change management, and this week I am running around training everyone on the new procedures. It takes longer to document and training people on new procedures then it takes to make the change in Innovator. I can update Innovator in minutes, then spend months documenting the changes, if everything could only be as easy as it is in Innovator life would be a lot simpler.
Thanks
Ron
