Preparing Your Design Automation for PDM
The purpose of Design Automation (DA) is to more quickly and easily generate the vast amount of outputs that are derived from design data like drawings, models, quotes, proposals, calculation sheets, etc. Of course, it should all be managed; preferably in a Product Data Management (PDM) system. However you choose to manage your data, whether with SolidWorks Enterprise PDM, ENOVIA SmarTeam, SolidWorks Workgroup PDM, or Skippy the Intern, you need a plan. And you need your Design Automation implementation to be designed with PDM in mind. Continue Reading
To say that DriveWorks 7 is a radical leap forward for this Design Automation tool is not a stretch in any way. The DriveWorks development team has poured an immense amount of effort into the newest version of their flagship product, but you may not even notice the most significant changes. Two major architectural changes to the product have moved this DriveWorks update from being an automated SolidWorks model generator into the sales configurator market space. 
Currently available as a Technology Preview to a limited audience, DriveWorks 7 is slated for General Availability to the entire DriveWorks community by the end of February, 2010.
We regularly have clients ask us what information they should gather concerning a support issue, prior to calling the Razorleaf helpdesk. So we thought it made sense to answer that question publicly. Here’s how you can “help us, help you.” 
Part numbers, quotation numbers, item numbers, revisions, serial numbers…they’re all sequential values that need to be unique, and need to be tracked. In most cases (Design Automation, Product Data Management, CRM, etc.) this means the creation of a database table to hand out and track these identifying numbers and their related data. To ensure that the numbers are unique, most tables will be setup with a unique ID field that will automatically be populated by a database server. But what happens when your ID counter (automatic sequencer) needs to be reset? 
