PDM is known as a necessary evil in most engineering worlds. Why it’s labeled “evil”, I’ll explain in a bit. It’s necessary because of 2 reasons: Engineering and related disciplines create a huge amount of data and that data is related to parts which are related to a product structure and that may also be related to tooling and equipment. PDM excels at storing all this data securely and managing the relationships between it and the changes that happen to it. The use of 3D compound document design systems pretty much require PDM after a couple years of use with more than a half dozen authors. Compound document design systems build assemblies from parts and subassemblies that are all independent files. When you open an assembly, the design system actually must find and open each and every component file that makes up that assembly, so on an assembly comprised of 350 unique components, your opening 350 files. Couple this with cross assembly use of com...
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