With every Inventor or Product Design and Manufacturing Collection (PDMC) you purchase from Autodesk, you will get access to the data management system that Autodesk has developed. This software is the Autodesk Vault. There are 2 versions of the Autodesk Vault.
The one that you get as an entitlement when purchasing Inventor or PDMC is the Autodesk Vault Basic. This allows you to manage your CAD data as well as other documents like Excel, Word and even digital images. The software is only available for CAD users. The software that they can use is not limited to Inventor but AutoCAD, Navisworks, 3DS Max and even Revit.
If you want more functionality out of the Autodesk Vault software you can purchase Autodesk Vault Professional. This software opens up the software to non CAD users. Through the Autodesk Vault thin client they are able to access the information stored in the Autodesk Vault using their internet browser like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge.
Wth the Autodesk Vault Pro comes many opportunities for automation. If you are creating sheetmetal components there is a high probability that you will need to create DXF files of the flat pattern of the part. If you have worked in Inventor you know that this can be a time consuming task.
If you have 100 parts, you need to flatten 100 parts manually and then you need to go through the process of saving out each file as a DXF. With the Autodesk Vault Pro software you can automate this process to take place at a certain stage of your work process.
With that in mind, how and where does this automation process take place. Queue the Job Procesor.
The Job Processor is installed with the Vault client software. Autodesk’s preferred installation is for it to be on a separate CAD workstation specced PC, as the workload can get quite intensive. So if you install it on the server you run the risk of the software not running at it’s optimal performance.
During the lifecycle state change the Vault server willl send out an instruction that the DXF flat pattern should get created. This instruction will be grabbed by the Job Server and then executed. As there might be many jobs being created by the server, and as each job will take a specific amount of time, you can setup more than 1 Job Processor to half or quarter the amount of time that it taes to process all the jobs.
Another job that is very cumbersome is te creation of PDF’s maybe for the sales team or the client. This can be generated for DWG (Inventor or AutoCAD) or IDW files. As you probably know this is also a very time consuming task and when the design changes you will also need to remember that a new PDF needs to be regenrated, otherwise when you give the drawing pack to the client or sales person, there might be inaccuracies as the the PDF is outdated.
As you can see in the below image, there is a vast number of jobs that can be performed straight out of the box for the Job Processor. If you develop onto the Vault, you are also able to send tasks to the Job Server to make your program more efficient and make your workload a lot less.
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