Bus? You want a BUS? how about when your board of directors is driving the bus?
Pretty much the antithesis of Dean's post: We have a division that has been run autonomously since we bought them 10 years ago. Different CAD systems, different documentation systems, manufacturers, vendors.... Now maybe it's time to start capturing some of that in our main systems, so we hired a (just "a") guy to start gathering all that. Oh, but now we can save money by closing an office. So let's choose the main office of that autonomous division. They aren't a core part of our business. We can do all of this in China where engineers get paid so much less. And since they are closed, we don't need that guy anymore. The company that just bought us realized they ARE a core part of our business, let's ramp it up! Oops, China group can't do this stuff. So here I am, poring through network servers and completely unfamiliar documentation structures and electrical and mechanical CAD in different formats..... A simple ECN has come up to remove ONE capacitor. It LOOKS like it fixes a problem. Why was it there anyway? What other problems would it cause to remove it? We can't ask all those engineers that we let go. And I have NO clue how they even document or implement an ECN!
Just glad the new owners canned the whole board before they could back the bus up and rev it up again.
I am the only PCB designer in the company (including our new parent that makes me one in over 15K employees). I've been here 25 years. That's pretty much our plan for maintaining historical information. I've written a number of company design and documentation standards, checklists, calculation worksheets. These were intended to help with the transition of PCB design to EEs in our China group. They haven't used any of it. At least they use the same CAD and doc software, so it's not quite as hard to try to figure out what they did.
i would like to implement some of the great ideas presented here, but that will have to wait until the dust settles. What I've done in the past is tried as much as possible to keep things within industry and company standards. Create complete and detailed design rules. Only cheat the CAD system as a last resort. Add attributes to parts, nets, etc. describing anomalies. Insert text documents with special instructions, but those are admittedly uncommon and not very detailed. I try to keep in mind that someday, someone may have to look at my designs and say "What in the world was he thinking?!" Because there will be 25 years of that with no co-conspirators to still be here when I'm not.
Yeah, who needs us anyway, when any EE can hit the Autoroute button?
(sorry for the rant, quite frustrating job lately, but at least I have one) Pete
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