Material Compliance in ENOVIA V6
Regulatory compliance of materials and substances used within products is a monumental issue faced by most companies. Your supply base needs to be made aware of the compliance requirements and certify that their products do not exceed threshold levels of specific materials. The issue is compounded as your supply chain gets more and more complex. Different states have different regulations and some have much stricter product material laws than others. It gets even harder if your products are delivered globally, since different countries all have different regulations and different reporting structures. Fortunately, ENOVIA V6 can offer some solutions to these complex problems. Continue Reading
When creating your SolidWorks assembly master models and preparing them for automation, a lot of decisions need to be made in developing the best mating schemes. One important consideration in this development is the creation of the relations between components. The design intent in your models can be established by parameters that are driven by your automation tool, or by relations within SolidWorks. Let’s dig into this a bit deeper to uncover some an important design automation best practice related to SolidWorks mating. 
SolidWorks Enterprise PDM offers a number of ways to work with BOMs (Bills of Materials). For a while, SolidWorks Enterprise PDM (and its previous incarnation, Conisio) offered only EPDM Document BOMs. However, in EPDM 2008 (aka PDMWorks Enterprise 2008), SolidWorks introduced the Item Explorer, along with Items and Item BOMs. This logical extension of Enterprise PDM functionality was applauded by the EPDM community, but still causes a bit of confusion regarding how to use both EPDM Document BOMs and EPDM Item BOMs. 
Microsoft recently introduced a product called PowerPivot. You may have heard about it under it’s code name Gemini. The idea of PowerPivot is simple: allow Microsoft Excel users to quickly filter, analyze and display massive amounts of data and share their findings via SharePoint. PowerPivot allows users to build analytic information by pulling data from various data sources throughout the company. In Microsoft’s words PowerPivot is a “business intelligence application that enables business users to integrate many data sources, including Web data.” 
For any who create or interact with Bills of Material, you know that there are often structures in the design that should be consolidated in the BOM – phantoms (sometimes also called “ghost” assemblies). There are also sometimes components, and even entire structures, that should not be represented at all in the BOM. To help accommodate these needs, ENOVIA SmarTeam’s BOM functionality provides flexibility when it comes to displaying and rolling up items in a BOM structure. In particular, the InBOM attribute and related functionality is worth diving into for addressing these needs. 
Bills of Materials (BOMs) are a tricky subject since different industries, and companies within those industries have unique standards for how their BOMs and parts lists are documented. SolidWorks Corporation has done quite of job of creating different tools to support different types of BOMs and BOM methodologies. There are tools in SolidWorks itself (the CAD tool), and a number of additional capabilities in Enterprise PDM (the data management tool). Here is an explanation of the various types of SolidWorks BOMs and Enterprise PDM BOMs. 
Dassault Systemes delivered the first real release of V6 back in 2009 with V6R2010. Since that time, the PLM software provider has been releasing new iterations of V6 twice a year. The most recent release, V6R2011, shows increasing maturity in a number of areas such that parts of the product which were only “preliminary” in previous versions are now fully functional for production use. There are highlights to all brands in the V6 portfolio, but let’s focus on some of the changes in the brands most relevant to Razorleaf clients: CATIA, 3DVIA, and ENOVIA. 
