If you have worked on Factory Design Utilities and have to create a long wall or safety chain, and have only worked in the Inventor portion of the solution, you will know that creating those long chains, piece by piece is very tedious. Having to click and place each section is not conducive to quick productivity and if your PC is not up to spec you can have a very long and frustrating day.
Factory Design Utilities has a solution for this with chain assets. You can recognise the difference between a normal asset and a chain asset by the little chain icon in thetop left corner of the picture of the asset in the asset manager.
The chain asset will not be placed as a static piece but on a line that you have created in a sketch. Once the line has been specified of where you want your asset to run, you will generate the asset. I have tried this in Inventor and even though it works, I find creating your layout in AutoCAD is much quicker and easier. If you think about it, we have been creating factory layouts in AutoCAD for years and years and that formula still works the best. As the saying goes, if it is not broke why try and fix it.
The advantage of the factory design utilities is the fact that you can get your 3D assets out in Inventor when linking from AutoCAD instead of having to create every thing from scratch.