CAD Forum

Hello fellow engineers!

I have lately been juggling with ideas and methods for team communication and issue tracking. As I am on a path involving design team development, I have been thinking of ways to collect and save design choices, track issues, and general knowledge involved in the design process of a concept or product.

To me, design journal in SolidWorks doesnt feel sufficient and working in longterm and built-in comment tool has no tracking functions or any general view or dashboard for management purposes.

One interesting solution is Five Flute, but is there some alternatives out there?

Do you know solutions for such tasks or how is these implemented in your organizations? Our team has ppl in three different offices around the nation of which one resides by the manufacturing plant.

We use smartsheet here. I have a workflow that notifies people when I change tasks or other things with regards to projects.

We use Microsoft Teams and also have a bunch of checklists created as excel files for our department.

Each departments uses their own tools, therefor we streamlined things to the ERP so that an overseeing 3rd party(directors and supervisors) which represents every department then discusses these issues before sending them to the appropriate departments. When we introduce new "tools" such as checklists we try to discuss these internally so that every department can benefit of it.

I think what's most important, is finding a way to communicate while leaving the least room for interpretation. Too often things are misinterpreted because there is a certain lack of detail which leaves room for interpretation. We found that having images and text is more efficient then only using one of either.

I suppose this could be done in PDM or the Manage products. I think Manage has process and project management where you can attach the files and create tasks. For a cost of course

Our official issue tracking tool is JIRA here.... although a lot of our mech folks tend to avoid it...

A lot of people still prefer the good ol excel spreadsheet.... but i personally find it really annoying when it come it attaching image, collaborating and the row limit

For smaller project, i will just stick to onenote

For personal project, i tend to use Notion (https://www.notion.so/)