Flyingscot and all, how do your companies handle Revision Control? Do you use a two place identifier to differentiate between a schematic/BOM change and a physical board change? One of the issues is, if the board/schematic changes on a sub-assembly, the revision has to be changed all the way up to top level. I have always asked for a serial eeprom on a system level board to be included in the design to track revision and serial number data that can be retrieved remotely if a product is at a customer location. Simply polling the EEPROM has expedited a lot of customer service related issues including warranty validation based upon cross referencing serial numbers to manufacturing dates. Having the revision level of the BOM and board really helps the R&R department troubleshoot existing problems with known solutions. How does everybody else do this?
TalmoorZ,
Recently, I had to create a procedure for Software version control and I found some very good open source tools that did a great job. The revision automatically increments whenever there is a change to the source code and old revision is archived. Check out Wikipedia's list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revision_control_software and you will see some really good free programs. If you need help with any of these, feel free to contact me and I can share what I have learned with you. I have a CE website www.componentsengineering.com and I have been considering adding a paper covering this topic. Is this something you think most CEs would be interested in?
It will be nice to have these features explicit in ECAD packages. Also, there is need for some form of standardization. I have not seen it much. Is there any effort in this direction?
For proper revision control proper systems support is a must. With a company outsourcing to many vendors and the suppliers catering to many comapnies it is a many to many situation and any gaps in the revision control documentation will result in a total confusion across. A well integrated ERP system only can take care of ensuring that the latest revision parts are ordered, manufactured and supplied.
Version control within software is very important and there's a whole science associated with it. Versioning in software might be slightly different than it is for engineering components. The versions take into account major software updates, minor software updates and bug fixes etc.
You will see a full procedure that you can download and there is also a form under the "Forms" tab. I should have PART 2 next week. Thanks for the comment.
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