How SOLIDWORKS PDM Helps Santas Workshop Prepare for the Holiday Season
Summary
This season was shaping up to be like all the others following the status quo and having the workshop deal with the typical, yearly woes that come from trying to rapidly produce all these toys for everyone on the nice list. The first challenge that Santa brought up was that it was hard for his elves to work together efficiently stemming from two major places: not being able to track what had been done to a given toy accurately and not knowing when there was a newer version that was made by someone else. The final challenge Santa discussed with us is that occasionally the production elves will make a toy from previous years because they couldn’t easily find the newest approved drawing. He couldn’t possibly deliver an old version of a toy and if this happened, he would need to stop production to verify none made it onto his sleigh, costing plenty of valuable time. For the vault spun up at the North Pole, the workflow was customized such that on approval of a toy STEP files were generated and put into the production folder.