Unlocking the value of legacy data

Over at the PTC Creo blog this week, I’m musing on how to recapture the value of legacy data — all those CAD models you created in the past, now stored on drives all over the place (or archived in a PDM/PLM if you’re so inclined), gathering the equivalent of digital dust. They’re a treasure trove: Good ideas, abandoned for some reason. Product variants that never made it into production. A starting point for the next design iteration. How much of an investment do you have tied up in those parts, doing nothing for your business? The hard part has always been figuring out the best way to move these ideas forward, from CAD modeller to CAD modeller, as technology changed and you implemented new solutions. [If you’re not a CAD person, think about Wang documents stored on 5 inch floppies; how would you get that into the word processor you’re using today? Same general idea.] Some teams migrate all of their parts each time they update CAD authoring tools; others take a piecemeal approach. One takes a long time and probably results in higher quality output; the other takes more time if all added together, but gets the team moving more quickly in the meantime. Head over to the Creo blog to read more. And don’t forget to comment here, there or on LinkedIn if you’ve got something to add.