About Structure Management

Teamcenter Structure Manager provides a way to create and maintain your product structure comprising assemblies and parts. Specifically, you can import, view, and modify the structure, which is displayed as a multilevel indented list. You can also configure the structure by managing revisions, effectivity, and structure variants.

When working with large assemblies comprising thousands of parts, such as cars, Structure Management helps you manage these volumes by performing several tasks. You can view and compare multiple structures, edit structures, configure views, track the changes, and personalize and share views.

As the complexity and variability of the product increases, the amount of data increases even more. Using Smart Discovery for Structures, your site administrator can index structures so that you can find the correct product definition required to do your work. Indexing structures makes the search faster and provides advanced structure filtering and configuration capabilities.

Example

To fix a design issue, an engineer wants to work with the engine block of the car. When the car structure is indexed, the engineer can search for the engine assembly within the structure without having to expand the entire structure. The engineer can further filter the search results to locate all elements that are at a proximity of 10 mm from the engine block.

The following graphic shows how different areas in Teamcenter can play a role in managing a structure:

Where do I go from here?

Administrator	To deploy Structure Management, see Structure Management ─ Deployment and Administration. To index structures by using Smart Discovery, see Structure Indexing Using Smart Discovery.
Business User
I want to perform structure management tasks in Rich Client.	See Structure Management on Rich Client.
I want to create a structure.	You can create structures by: Duplicating a product structure. Importing a structure from Excel.
I want to make changes to a structure and its properties.	You can add or remove content from a structure or replace a structure component. You can also edit the properties of a part or an assembly.
I want to find differences between my current structure configuration and another structure.	You can do this by comparing product structures.
I want to configure a structure based on the current product or project requirements.	To do this, follow the procedure to configure structures by revision rules, variant rules, and effectivity. You can also configure structures by selection and proximity if your administrator has set up Smart Discovery for Structures.
I want to filter a structure so that I can work with a specific product definition.	See filtering structures. You can filter a structure only if the structure is indexed using Smart Discovery indexing. You can save a filtered and configured structure within a session. Sessions help you to easily locate the product definition that you are currently working with.

Take a look at the video gallery for a quick overview of some Structure Manager tasks.