Make it Easy for Engineers to Manage & Verify Weight in Creo

00:00 Good morning, everybody. Glad to have you here. I'm I'm Bill Ryan from Peterbilt Motors Company. I'm here to talk to you about rolling up weight and Creo. And so in my my previous life, I was a vehicle property owner for weight for our for our trucks. And so that really got me on this journey of trying to figure out how to get weight into our into our models and so we can roll up weight for full truck. And so there are lots of things that we wanted to I don't want to show you on how we made it really easy.

00:31 Try to make it easy for engineers to to work in Creo and get those weights into the models, roll it up. And so a couple of a couple of questions for the audience. In your environment, do you have a simple way to to have the engineers check for weight? I mean, raise your hands. Do you provide a simple. Okay, that's good to see. And this this is probably going to be a little bit smaller group. But do you have large assemblies that make it really hard to calculate and regenerate?

01:04 Right. So you kind of you can't have the regeneration and the calculations on all the time when people are regenerating. So that's that's our world. We have to have a toggle to on demand, make it so engineers can turn the weight environment on. And then this one is probably really rare. But this is this goes back to our start parts a long time ago. Does anybody know if their weight attributes that go into their drawing is a string value versus real number? Does anybody have that? So so so you're lucky there.

01:34 So and that's not going to all this stuff I'm going to show you today has no bearing to that. But I was just from from our standpoint, that was one of one of our problems. So our company profile, we build trucks. I got a sister company, Kenworth, here, too. We're under the Packer umbrella. I like to give the you know, the financials are going to give you the financials. But I think the cool engineering stat that we have as a company at Packer is our is our complexity, right?

02:06 So so our I'm in Denton, I'm right next to our manufacturing plant. I can walk out to the plant floor and see all the trucks being built. We build 150 to 200 trucks a day. 5050 of those are unique variant and our bill of materials system. It's not one bill of material for that truck. It's logic and selection for 5 to 600 bill materials. And so those 5 to 600 bill of materials inside all of those, there's, you know, eight up to 8000 parts. And so and that's that's just the audible parts.

02:39 So you imagine an engine, a transmission when you get to CAD, those number of parts increase. And I'm saying 150, 150,000 CAD objects per per truck. But that's that's probably conservative. So this is why we're here today, right? Wouldn't it be great if you had an environment where the regeneration were your performance is good all the all the time except for that one time before you check in or whenever you want to see the weight,

03:09 you have an option to turn this weight environment on and and get those weight and those models right. And then the other thing is, is. We have multiple way attributes coming from from vendors, from scales. It's nice for us and I'm sure it'd be nice for everybody else. We want to get that weight into Windchill to where it can be used in downstream. You want to feed this information to to other users, right in your in your company. So this is what this is what we want to do.

03:41 We want to enable weight for different types in Windchill. And then and then obviously, like I stated before, it'd be nice to have a simple check for the for the weights. And as I alluded to earlier, our problem was, is that we had string and so we needed actual vendor and CAD to be in the in the in the models.

04:11 So this is this is this was our kind of our main solution for the engineers. It was basically an update into the ribbon. Now we have tool kit in the background that's monitoring stuff based on actions. But this this this was one of the things that that shows up whenever the user launches. It's nothing rocket science here. It's just a it's buttons in a ribbon. So one of the buttons in the ribbon. This is this is where really where the tool kit comes into play.

04:41 So this is this is the quick verification check. It pops up and it has it has the all the main functions for weight. Right. You need you really for weight. You need to see the material. You need to see the density and you need to see the attribute or the or the mass that's in your model. So so we we provided a pop up box that has just that information for the user to quickly see. And then within this , within this box we have, we have some additional buttons that's that's intuitive for the user to, to click on. And the key thing is, is checking the weight, change the material.

05:16 And then in this button we've got to regenerate function to regenerate the weights. And you can never provide the the user enough visuals to to see information. And one of the things nice about Creo parametric is, is you can manipulate that that model three column. When I was developing all these relations I always in assembly mode. I always wanted to make sure that every one of my parts had density. So so we provided a button to show these columns in the model tree, which is just your density and your mass and your

05:47 the attributes that are being populated. And then we also, as I alluded to before, we're we have lots of vendors giving us files, step files, import. And so and a lot of those files we need to ask the vendor for, for the weights. And so we wanted a quick way to allow that user to enter vendor weight. And if they, if they scale, they're going to go and weigh in on a scale we wanted an easy way for them to add it also.

06:19 And this is this is just a just a slide showing really the the vision of where we were trying to get to from the beginning was, is we we we developed this cost weight app. And so this this is really where the the attributes that are coming out of Windchill we wanted to push it to an application where we can roll up the weight of a full truck. And then from from a standpoint when I was when I was doing our analysis early on when we were developing weight stuff and this cost and weight roll up stuff, we I interviewed all the users and how they were working in the system.

06:50 And we had we had one engineer that his job is, is to assign weights to all the building materials in our system. And so he's, he's a visual person. So I the one thing that we were trying to develop is the nice thing about Creo view. Anybody can open it up. So I wanted to make Creo view, have that workflow to where you can just box select the objects in Creo view and sum up weight. So that's that was another, just a downstream benefit that you can take advantage of. Is, is your users don't have to go into Creo Prometric to do all the hard hard lifting.

07:23 They can go into Creo view to take some benefits and see see the weights in Creo view. Um, so these are the things that I so, so I'm fortunate. I'm, I'm one of the admins that gets to manipulate all the start parts for users. And so this, this slide shows you if you're, if you're, if you are one of the admins, these are some of the things that's the main things in the start part that you really need to get in. And so we, we made a decision because we've got multiple materials.

07:55 We we wanted to at least have a material added. You have to, you have to define your strategy and I'll go to go into a little bit more later. And then also all the parameters. Like I said, we got mascot and vendor and and actual weights and then your your relations. And so I can't give you the relations that we developed. But but there is some tech support sites out there that show you how to do some of these complex weights on the PTC site that we that we really

08:27 leverage to create our relations. This kind of summarizes all the key parameters. And I think, you know, from the main thing, you can take a screenshot of this, but there's the internal Creo Creo attributes , and then there's the, the real number attributes that we're feeding out. And then as I'm showing here, we the two string attributes that go to our that are drawings that we still use on our drawings as strings.

08:59 The other thing that's neat about this, the important thing here, so obviously the drawing is only going to display one value. We with our with our standards, we always we want to display the highest confidence level. So obviously in our world, if somebody went and weighed a weighted off a scale and entered actual weight, we want to feed that into the drawing. And so your your attribute that is your best friend here is the pro alt p mass.

09:29 That is your attribute that you want to be very aware of. If you want to override the mass based the internal mass that Creo is doing based on just the the geometry, right? So that that is your key attribute that you want to be aware of for, for manipulating and getting getting upper level assemblies to use that weight, that actual weight when it's summing up. So we I don't have any other companies like this. Some companies are lucky.

10:00 They can probably always have the drawing display the weight. We have complex part numbers to where sometimes we have to display a noted value in the weight cell on the drawing. And we have a table in the drawing that shows that actually shows the part numbers with the weights next to it in a table. And so this this is our we have it. We have this here, too, where we had an attribute and the user quickly enters yes or no, if he wants it to be model driven values. And so Susie toggles it.

10:34 No, then that attribute for weight goes to no. So that's that's kind of a neat way to to override it. And obviously whenever you're doing your calculations in Creo, you're still getting the the sums and everything but the, but the drawing weight, It's a quick way to to manage that. I'm another part of this project that I was, you know, luckier or whatever you want to say was that we optimized our entire import setup with

11:07 with this weight roll up. I'm just putting a plug in here because we we needed to add an attribute into our material library that basically fed into the material value on the drawing. And so I was able to open up all 256 of our materials that's in the Creo library and edit them all within four hours. I think it was. So Notepad Plus Plus has all kinds of fancy things for editing and being able to quickly go through all the all the information.

11:40 Just a quick plug for editing that. But but you can see we you probably want to look at your material library for for editing and making sure it's accurate. So so as I stated earlier, we we revamped our entire import profile stuff. And the one the one thing that that you can do is, is for your start part, when an engineer creates new, it has a material for that start part, right?

12:10 But when on our import profile, we wanted the user to automatically have a selection pre selected list of materials and each one of those materials. So when an engineer opens up the assembly and it has all the materials he can quickly at that point in time after he's imported, he can expand on the list of parts and see these four materials and he can right click in the model tree and assign that material. So this this is something that that we saw that was that was a benefit for the import

12:40 because if you're importing stuff from suppliers in our world, it's we want the weight right and and 99% of the time for us it's going to be aluminum, steel or a composite. So and and in general, those those mass properties are pretty pretty similar. And so from our standpoint, this you can add as many material pre-populated into that list as you want. But that's that was very valuable. The other thing that so the last my last time here at PTC in 2019, the only reason I came here was to talk to the program managers about this issue that

13:13 on the import profile, you really want to have optimization of solid models, right? That's your goal. You want to. So we wanted to apply our start part templates with our relations attributes, datums layers. But at the same time we wanted to read in that model accuracy from that step file that the supplier put on it, right? And so that's how you and that functionality was not enabled in the Creo version when we started this. So, so this, this check box where you read your templates plus apply

13:47 the external accuracy to get your optimized solid models for for weight roll up this. This is a good setting to be aware of if you're doing your import profile. And I've got the path here to where the where the import profile is how to manage it if you're not managing import profiles yet. But that was that's one of the things we just implemented the import profile with our weight set up. Another thing that was that's easy. Whenever engineers, whenever they go to the tools parameters in Creo,

14:19 it's just a long list of Windchill parameters that are that the engineer could care less to see those. And so this config file basically sets up a filter so you can go to your standards and say, Hey, I just want to show these standards to the engineer. When they go to that that view. So, so they're only seeing the important stuff. You know, it's important to give the information, the right information to the engineer, right And so so we had we had one that's for weight attributes and then we had one for the drawing, right? And so by default, we're we're showing the drawing attributes,

14:50 obviously, but keep that in mind as a just an enhancement for your users to make it easy for them to to see the filters when they're working. So I'm doing well on time. So, so, so I've got a video here. So I watched I watched Paul Sager present the other day and my video is going to be similar to his. What I'm saying may not align because it's fast, but but I want to show you this. This kind of summarizes how the how the how the application works and

15:23 the buttons I'm hitting. And so let me let me play the video now. It's working. So in Korea, we're hitting the button to verify and it's going to show the tool kit. And the first thing is, is obviously it has to have material. And so if it's a watcher, the tool kit is a watcher. It's looking in the background to make sure the material is getting added. So we give the user the quick, quick buttons to quickly get to the changing of the materials. We also, from our standpoint,

15:55 we had a lot of legacy objects and so we needed to convert to the standards. And so we gave the user a pop up to quickly hit that button to convert, to get to get to the standards with the new relations, new attributes that we want in the models. Then we also have a quick way to check the parameters. So this is going to pop up and. Verify. This is the quick verify. You hit it. It's telling you there's no there's no issues. And so and that's checking for attributes and wait stuff.

16:29 And the other thing is, like I stated earlier , we added a button in our toolkit to, to show the columns that just repeat that and here's here's the user entering the the vendor wait override. And so the all the attributes get updated to show the vendor. And I'm changing changing material here. And that shows that integrated attribute that's in

16:59 the material library that's that's added. So here So you have to watch quick here. This is our 120 line relation. So we had this this was really the meat of the project. This this is this is where all the fancy stuff happens is in that relation on setting the priority, getting the attributes to populate. And then here I'm showing you the the filter that you want to take advantage of to show the users the important information.

17:36 And so this. So as I alluded to earlier, we created for materials for our import parts. But for our start part, we purposely put the density at one. So when the rate calculations went up, instead of being five kilograms, it was 500,000kg. So it was a quick visual check to say the weight was so high. The user is going to see that and know that he needs to do something to to change it. It's just another check to make sure we're doing it. And then the other the other thing is, is we work with simplified reps. This is a config.

18:06 There's a config setting that's important if you want to roll up the weights on the simplified reps. And we when we go to our weight environment, we toggle that on. And so this one is very nice because you can we can be working on our extremely large assemblies, toggle this and actually see the weight of what's just active at that point for our large assemblies. This that config setting is very good. And the other thing is, is family tables. Family tables require special handling.

18:38 We have two buttons in the ribbon, one for verify and then one when you're working in family tables, you need to go to this button because it's getting the weight regenerated in each instance requires some extra regeneration that we had to do. And so keep that in mind. If you're working with family tables, you you may want to we use the map keys in the background in the config to to region in addition to some of the regions in the toolkit just to handle

19:10 the family tables. And so just keep that in mind that it takes some time to to look at that and then that, that last part of that is just was another visual. I added a column in the workspace to show weights. And so that was. That was that the pdf should be attached to the to the presentation. But there's a if you scan this, you'll you'll actually get a document that has some of the key relation information, plus it has all our config settings with the reason why they're set.

19:42 So this, this is your gold for the presentation right here for coming to this meeting is getting this information here because it really summarizes all the configs and the and it does, it does have some of the key relation information that's needed. All right. Thank you.