Designing the product structure consists of building the engineering part revisions in a hierarchical structure. The structure enables you to keep track of parts at all levels of the product.
The creation is very simple and consists of connecting child engineering parts revisions to a parent by using Engineering Part Navigator/Consist Of. When you are finished connecting all child parts on the first level, you can continue to do the next level. This can continue as long as you desire until you have all levels in the structure defined. In the end, you have a total structure describing a top part or a sub part for your product.
Using the structure, you can go up and down between the levels, to the next and previous levels. There is also a "where used" (Engineering Part Navigator/Where Used) functionality that returns all the engineering part revisions to where a specific part is connected.
When building the structure, there could be a need for finding registered parts by either description or attributes. To accomplish this, you can use a best fit search method to perform a search on characteristics attributes of parts. If a part is not found, a new part should be created. You can configure a new product structure by copying a product structure from other parts. The same can be done with characteristics and document survey.
The design of the product structure can be given a develop level which defines the phase the design has reached. Examples of develop levels are: prototyping, testing, and manufacturing. The develop levels are defined in PDM/Basic Data/Develop Levels.
You cannot insert a serial tracked part as a child of a non-serial tracked part. However, a serial tracked part can have a non-serial part as a child.