What is purchasing?

Purchasing is the department that would deliver the drawings to manufacturing, in-house or outside suppliers for quotes. Purchasing would keep track of the revisions and where the parts were used. The drawings would include used on information. For example, Boeing would have the different effectivities (blocks of airplanes) for the different assemblies used. Many times one drawing would have many different configurations for the different airplanes defined as dash numbers. This is another place where PLM has failed. Due to the way the Pro/e paradigm is set up, you have to handle referenced external parts. While this may be advantageous for conceptual design it is a horror show for final released projects and to be used as deliverables. They should be in one single file where all information is available without resorting to the convoluted native file system. I describe a more logical system below.