Using Families of Parts

This project focused not only on how to create the families of parts, but developing a way to make them useful for the entire group of designers using CADDS5. These designers are located in three different plants, but are all on RayNet, Raytheon's intranet. The parts that the designers create and use are all stored on a group of servers located at one of these plants. The total disk space used by these parts, which number around 6500, is around 10,000 megabytes. This does not include any of the parts that have been removed from disk and archived on tapes. There are also other designers at other plants that do not use the same parts servers, and so don't share parts with users in other divisions.

When this project started, there were several scripts that had been developed by people at Raytheon to make it easier for the designers to find parts on the system. In order for the designers to use the families of parts, they have to know which families are available, what parts are available in each family, what those parts are named, and where to find them. The existing parts could be searched using the existing utilities, but the partnames often don't give enough information about the parts for a designer to figure out which one to use merely by looking at it.

Another problem was that these search scripts only allow people to search for parts that are currently on the system. One of the major advantages of the Family of Parts system is that not all of the parts have to be kept on the system all the time. Clearly, a new search system had to be developed if the family of parts concept was going to work.

Last Modified: Wed Aug 28 14:41:29 EDT 1996