Team 254 Open-Source Release: Cheesy Parts

[Pat Fairbank]

Originally Posted by craigboez

254

Thanks for posting this. Its obvious that a lot of effort went into the development of this system. I've just finally gotten around to playing around with the working demo and am very impressed. While tinkering I came up with a few questions:

• How do you integrate this with your purchasing group to procure all the raw materials and parts? It looks like some of the parts just have descriptions while some add a part number and/or manufacturer name. How does the person purchasing know what to order and where from?
• Who is in charge of setting up new parts, choosing when to group things into a subassembly, what to name something, etc?
• Who keeps this updated throughout the season? Is it one single person, a group? Is it updated hourly, daily, weekly?
• Did this system solve the issues you were attempting to address?

My team tends to run pretty lean, and often the same mentors aren't there on consecutive nights. When that happens things slow down as we try to figure out what needs to happen next. A system like this could really help us keep things more focused from night to night. I'm curious to learn more about how you used it and how well it worked.

Craig,

We didn't have purchasing integration for 2013, but we're working on it for 2014. We kept track of parts needing to be ordered in a Google spreadsheet, and someone would periodically check Cheesy Parts and make sure everything that was in "needs to be ordered" status was added to the spreadsheet. Obviously, this was a bit painful.

The designers each make the naming/grouping decisions for the parts that they are working on. The addition of the parts to the system is done sometime between when a file is created and when it is first saved to PDM. You can't really save something without knowing what to call it, and so since Cheesy Parts assigns the part numbers this pretty much enforces itself.

Everyone on the team has access to the system, so the responsibility for keeping it updated is shared. Generally, whoever worked on the part last is responsible for updating its status accordingly. This wasn't totally successful, but the worst offenders were some of the mentors...

I can't speak for the rest of the team, but in the project manager / shop supervisor role that I mostly find myself in during build season, it was a huge help when confronted with a bunch of students to find tasks for, and in keeping the stress levels down.