Handling of customer / supplier Drawing
Wondering if anyone had any advice in terms of handling Customer / Supplier drawings?
My current employer is looking to transfer supplier drawings onto their new EPDM drawings vault. My issue is that the company are looking to transfer the whole drawing and put this into their own drawing border. I only have 5 years of working in design from my previous employment but never came across this method and it seems slightly strange to myself. Is this common practice?
The issues I have is that firstly we will have differing revision controls as the supplier uses alphanumeric and company uses numeric. Therefore any revised drawing will need to be constantly controlled via the company drawing border. This also could lead to confusion for the ERP engineer who looks after controlling the BOM on the company ERP system. As he doesn't come from a engineering background and hence seeing two differing revisions could lead to confusion here in terms of what revision is put against the part on the ERP. I think the correct thing to use would be use the company revision here, but then this raises the problem of what revision is then displayed in terms of raising a purchase order for the component. As if our ERP system displays our revision this won't mean a thing to the supplier.
Other things which I think should really be taken into account: although drawing orientation shouldn't clash - this will rely on the correct one being selected originally. We have company in UK & US so need to establish if first / third angle and how supplier drawing orientation works will be problematic. Also general tolerancing and geometrics may differ between the borders, although these aren't machined in house again I think this would be slightly confusing. Finally we are currently using Solidworks, the drawing files we'd be looking to insert are pdf files, problem here being that inserting a pdf vector image isn't possible into solidworks, and it converts this to a simple bitmap image, so drawing clarity is then lost.
At my old employers we used to literally just put a rubber stamp our part number on the printed drawing and scan this, for BSI purposes the engineer would also sign and date the drawing. This was fairly quick and easy. Plus any loss of quality in the image through being re-scanned was far less than that of vector-bitmap I have witnessed.
The only other solution I could see would be a form of digital drawing stamp, if anyone uses this format I'd definately be interested to know the vendor. As this way although a physical signature wouldn't be captured, through the use of EPDM a digital signature would be present in the files history.