Creating building blocks and structures

When you create building blocks, you construct hierarchies of blocks that decompose systems and illustrate relationships among system elements. A building block can represent any element in a hierarchy, such as a function or a component of a product, a task in a work breakdown structure, or a job function in an organizational chart.

In Teamcenter, building blocks reside in folders, and a folder can contain any number of building blocks. Below each top-level building block, subordinate building blocks can be organized in multiple levels of parents, children, and siblings. To construct a view of an entire system, create a single building block for the system at the top level. At the next lower level, create child building blocks for the major subsystems. Below those, continue to decompose the system into finer levels of detail. For example:

(Diagram: building block hierarchy example — not reproduced)

In such a hierarchy, you can create building blocks at specific levels, promote them to higher levels, demote them to lower levels, and move them up or down within a level. For each building block, the number shows the level in the hierarchy and the position within the level. As the structure changes, Teamcenter renumbers values automatically for affected building blocks.

You can create trace links to and from building blocks, to show defining and complying relationships with other objects. Such relationships may exist between building blocks that reside within the same hierarchy. Also, building blocks may have trace links to objects that reside elsewhere in the same project or in a different project.