Research Of Methods To Upload Large Quantities Of Ship Documents In WINDCHILL PDM System

Informationization is becoming more and more prominent in strategic decision in the shipbuilding enterprises in China. To realize digital shipbuilding, many companies have drawn up a detailed blueprint for the future development, many universities and companies are also developing various information systems. The importation and implementation of PDM system is an important part. As a major platform of PDM, Windchill has been used in some domestic shipbuilding companies and it brings good application results.Ship is a integrated product that reflects modern industrial and technological level. During the ship design and construction process, there are a lot of drawings. When we use Windchill system to manage the information of ship design and manufacture, the first problem we may encounter is to upload large quantities of data. When we use the function of uploading documents provided by Windchill system, there are many disadvantages, such as the heavy workload, low efficiency, consuming long time and so on. To solve this problem, we develop two methods to upload large quantities of documents in this paper. First, we do the development of user interface in Windchill. Then, a new action in drop-down list and a sub tab action are added. We also make several JSP pages for different methods to upload documents.The first method: We can first compress a large quantities of data into a file, then send it to Windchill server, at last extract the file and save all the data into Windchill database. This method is convenient and efficient.The second method: We use Excel table to upload large quantities of multiple type documents. First, we write the document information into a Excel table, then send the Excel table to Windchill server, at last read the information in Excel and create documents in Windchill. According to this principle, we develop two methods to upload large quantities of multiple type documents. The first one is setting up multiple sheets in a Excel table to upload multiple type documents. The second is upload documents for a folder as units. In the former method, we should write detail information of documents into Excel table. With the increase in the number of documents, the work load of filling in the Excel table will increase. To solve this problem, we develop procedure to write part of document information into Excel table, so that the workload is reduced greatly.The methods developed in this paper have been successfully applied in Windchill and other system. The new methods are not only simple, convenient and efficient, but also provide a useful tool for Windchill utilization in ship PDM management.