Pre-amble:

I am posting this in the forums first with the hopes of getting live feedback from existing customers and those that I am actively working with. The hopes are to turn this into a legitimate blog or entity within the learning center or our website. I also aspire to create accompanying videos that cover each part with real projects and data to help walk users through the migration/adoption process.

What is this?

Welcome! Brad's Tech Advice: Company Set Up Series is for companies getting started with Onshape who are looking to structure and set up their environment to follow best practices for a database-driven, CAD, and data management system.

Working as Technical Services Engineers at Onshape we have had the privilege of supporting many extraordinary companies as they go through the roll-out, implementation, and use of our platform. Having gone through this process multiple times we have become very familiar with what a successful implementation looks like, which is why we’ve created this series with the hopes that it will act as a blueprint for new companies working through how to manage their Onshape projects.

The focus of this series is not meant to drill down into specific CAD features but rather, dive into the organization and flow of data within Onshape. Whether migrating a project from another CAD environment, starting from scratch in Onshape, or a mix of both I want this series to help walk you through common project scenarios and how to handle them from a company and user perspective.

Who should care?

CAD/IT administrators, owners and project managers. This series will be shown through the lens of Onshape Professional but the concepts can serve as a foundation for Onshape Enterprise as well.

Brad's Company Set Up Series is going to be an 9-part series of write-ups, some with accompanying videos (like this one).

Part 1: Building a Foundation

Part 2: Top-level Company Organization and Folder Structure

Part 3: Managing a ‘Common Components’ Folder

Part 4: Managing Project Folders

Part 5: Managing Your Work

Part 6: Migrating an Existing Project

Part 7 Project Modeling Approaches (i.e. master model)

Part 8: Working on a Project

Part 9: Conclusions and Incorporating Release Management

Before we can dive into the good stuff, we need to establish a common foundation of understanding for an appropriate starting point. That is where this first part comes into play. Let's begin:

Building a Foundation

Stealing from our help documentation, Onshape does not use files. Instead, it uses what we call Documents and Tabs. A document is a project-level container that can consist of one to several tab elements (we will dive more into this later). Tab elements can be Part Studios, Assemblies, Drawings, or even a PDF, video, or picture. Because tabs can hold almost any file type, all tab data is included in our data management and automatic audit trail. We highly recommend reading through the first few sections of our help documentation as an introduction to how Onshape approaches CAD and data management.

It's important to understand that Bootcamp and the Fundamental self-paced courses are NOT a basic CAD training course, but rather a necessary step for those with previous CAD experience to become acclimated to how Onshape works.

Onshape is different

Having confidence in how to use the CAD tools of Onshape and gaining an early glimpse into the power of integrated data management leads us to our second prerequisite before diving in.

Understanding that a Document's history is capturing what happens in every single tab at a certain point in time is key to understanding how to organize a project that will contain many parts and sub-assemblies that all have varying degrees of inter-relatedness or even re-usability across multiple projects.

Enough of me talking at you, let's have you engage! After going through these prerequisites please be in touch with your Customer Success Manager to let them know you are participating. We pride ourselves on our customers’ success, and we love seeing the innovative products our users are pushing out into the world. If you have any questions or feedback, let us know. 

This will be a multi-part series that I am hoping to release on a regular cadence until completion. Stay tuned!

Part 2: Top-level Company Organization and Folder Structure