Replace part (studio) / subassembly in main assembly

3dcad

I'm playing with production line layout with multiple machines, robots and conveyors. Some of the units are fully designed in Onshape some partially (assembled) and some are imported by suppliers.

First version is easy to create, just add subassemblies one by one into main assembly - robots (assembled in Onshape) remain movable with realistic limits, imports are flattened & grouped to work as placeholder, newly created parts are mated into existing geometry.

But then supplier import another step, conveyor V2 or machine v2 - what then? Remove old version, lose all mates on that and insert new flattened & grouped subassembly and recreate all mates.. Do this untill V13   

OR teach Onshape to everyone involved and force them to modify models in Onshape - good option but not very realistic..

Let's say I have assembly like this:

And I wan't to change the first conveyor to a wider one. Ok, supplier uploads another conveyor into my shared document.
So now I have a new conveyor as step file - how would you make the change efficiently? @philip_thomas @jakeramsley @NeilCooke @lougallo

3dcad

I think todays cad should be designed to use external models as part of design flawlessly - it doesn't make sense to recreate stuff just to be able to fit them into assembly. Many companies invest a lot to bring their products available - we should be able to take maxinum advantage on those investments.

Any thoughts?

ml

very good question over which i struggled also while importing step models from suppliers! how to replace them or subassemblies without loosing mates?

fitting answer needed. collaboration is a mission statement - but the prerequisite could not be that anyone is working in onshape