Anyone pushing process details from CAD into PLM instead of burying them in drawings? I’m piloting MBD/PMI in SolidWorks 2024 — material 6061-T6, anodize black, Op10 mill/Op20 ream, ISO 2768-mK — and want those properties to auto-populate BOM and routing when we release to Arena; which custom properties or parameters have stayed stable through CAM and ECOs?
Arena; which custom properties or parameters have stayed stable through CAM and ECOs? We’ve had the best luck with config-specific props with fixed names: keep SW-Material for 6061-T6, a plain Finish string for anodize, GeneralTol for ISO 2768-mK, and one RoutingOps text like Op10 mill; Op20 ream mapped to an Arena UDF — CAM edits don’t mangle those like PMI or feature names. One caveat: if your CAM spawns a new configuration, point the connector at the active config or you’ll push stale values; what Arena connector are you on?
Short answer from my side: I’m seeing the same pattern — one concrete thing that helped was writing down the exact handoff and timebox it to 15–20 min. Does that match what you’re running into?
I’d keep routings in a single, versioned custom property like “ProcessSpec” (JSON or delimited) driven by Property Tab Builder dropdowns, so Arena maps one field and CAM ignores it cleanly. @mjohnson44’s fixed-name configs are solid; I’d skip separate Op10/Op20 properties since they get orphaned on ECOs. If your Arena connector can’t parse JSON, use a semicolon string with stable keys and it’ll survive CAM and change cycles.
What’s worked for me is a dedicated, read-only ‘PLM’ configuration and a tiny release macro that snapshots material/finish/tolerance/op codes into one custom property ‘MfgData’ on that config, so CAM can churn other configs without touching what Arena reads… @dmiller93 have you tried locking that config via PDM state instead of just naming discipline?