Hey All,
Here's a bit of background to supplement my main question.
I work for a small engineering/technology company that has settled upon PTC/Creo/Windchill as its CAD/PDM solution. Due to our size, I've had to assume the role of Windchill admin, and while I have eight years of experience from the user side of Creo/Windchill (ProE/Intralink) from my previous company, I'm currently lacking most of the database, programming, and IT knowledge necessary to competently administrate.
One of the reasons we ended up choosing PTC as our solution for CAD/PLM was our reseller's insistence that we could integrate our semi-intelligent part numbering system into Windchill and have it handle the generation of part numbers. Now that we've had the "roll out" and I've had time to pour through PTC Help Center, PTC Community, and all the reference documents, I'm realizing this might be a bit more difficult than originally expressed to us.
Our part numbering isn't overly complex. We a (2) alpha character prefix followed by a (5) digit incremental number (examples: PA10001, PA10002, RP10001, RP10002). With my naive understanding of the backend of Windchill, I envisioned work status ("in work", "released", "obsolete", etc) and soft types ("part", "assembly", "drawing", "ecad", etc) dictating the prefix nomenclature and then Windchill incrementing the number portion.
My question(s) is basically .... is this possible? If not is there something close to this that would work? Does anyone use Windchill for part number control in a non-"out of the box" configuration? If they do, how is it implemented?
The documentation I've found through PTC hasn't been the most helpful or provide the depth an admin with my lack of experience would need, but please point me in the direction of any helpful literature.
Setup Info:
Creo 4.0
Windchill 11.0
MS SQL Server 2014 SP1
Thanks!
Jesse