How do you rate Altium Vault

[jubei]

Hi all
Just started a contract, setting up a feasibility study on introducing the Vault to a large European based company.
Would like to get some real life experiences, with vault, from you guys.
After implementation does it really help to reduce component cost ?
Do individual designers get pissed when constrained to a defined component set, or to a defined workspace ?
Dont hold back, want to hear the good the bad and the friggin awful,  stuff Altium dont want me to hear 

[dboyer]

Do we get part of your fee for helping? 

[DerekG]

After implementation does it really help to reduce component cost?

I presume you are referring to the Altium Component Vault.

This has nothing to do with the cost of the part. It just contains the integrated schematic & footprint details from many/most of the individual manufacturers.

Do individual designers get pissed when constrained to a defined component set, or to a defined workspace?

No, because you are not constrained to what is in the library. You can download the part then easily change every aspect of it as you wish. Then you simply resave it with a different name.

Don't hold back, want to hear the good the bad and the friggin awful,  stuff Altium don't want me to hear 

Most complaints re Altium refer to:
1/ unfixed bugs
2/ price
3/poor support times
4/ Altium generally as a company

[jubei]

After implementation does it really help to reduce component cost?

I presume you are referring to the Altium Component Vault.

This has nothing to do with the cost of the part. It just contains the integrated schematic & footprint details from many/most of the individual manufacturers.

Do individual designers get pissed when constrained to a defined component set, or to a defined workspace?

No, because you are not constrained to what is in the library. You can download the part then easily change every aspect of it as you wish. Then you simply resave it with a different name.

Don't hold back, want to hear the good the bad and the friggin awful,  stuff Altium don't want me to hear 

Most complaints re Altium refer to:
1/ unfixed bugs
2/ price
3/poor support times
4/ Altium generally as a company

Nope referring to the new all singing and dancing Vault 2 , a complete PLM, with a license, desktop preferences servers , and shed lots more
As far as i can see with or without the vault should be possible to get real time pricing information , per part, in the libs dialog, even linkable to external company database.
That should give designer lots more choices then currently for minimizing final product cost.

But take your general feelings on altium on board, i think they move a bit quick, and leave a few bugs as they run forward, but look at the competition, would you really want to go with mentor ( 3 times the cost ) or Cadence ( even more ) given the competition there really is no choice ( have not counted the little fish, small companies and progs, they tend to dissapear and go bust like mayflys !!! )

[jubei]

Do we get part of your fee for helping? 

Err no lol, not unless you want to write the scripts for me lol

[free_electron]

Pricing is for the beancounters.
As an engineer i do not care about cost of the parts. First get the damn thing working withing electrical specs. Cost tuning comes afterwards.
Sorry, can't be bothered finding cheaper alternates. Hire someone to do that.

[jubei]

Pricing is for the beancounters.
As an engineer i do not care about cost of the parts. First get the damn thing working withing electrical specs. Cost tuning comes afterwards.
Sorry, can't be bothered finding cheaper alternates. Hire someone to do that.

Dude WTF !!!
As single designer and single owner of a company, just dont have the luxury of that attitude, ( ok contracting for big company at mo but thats not normal ).
You f**ck the cost target, the product dont sell, the product dont sell , you dont eat !!! Thats the real world , for every " conceptual designer " or "electron wrangler " there is a whole bunch of people putting bread on their tables. Ignore the production designers and operators then you ignore your own wage packet.
The only place that dont happen is, large companies, the military and safety critical and aerospace. so if your part of that lot good on you !

[Bassman59]

Pricing is for the beancounters.
As an engineer i do not care about cost of the parts. First get the damn thing working withing electrical specs. Cost tuning comes afterwards.
Sorry, can't be bothered finding cheaper alternates. Hire someone to do that.

Then they'll hire someone who doesn't understand why you chose the parts you did, and the design will be marginal or worse, it'll break. But since you designed it, you'll be blamed.

[koko79]

[i]But take your general feelings on altium on board, i think they move a bit quick, and leave a few bugs as they run forward, but look at the competition, would you really want to go with mentor ( 3 times the cost ) or Cadence ( even more ) given the competition there really is no choice ( have not counted the little fish, small companies and progs, they tend to dissapear and go bust like mayflys !!! )
[/i]

Mentor Expedition would be 3 x Altium cost but the Pads software will be competitively priced. The Cadence PCB and Schematic tools start at £1795 so does not have to be 3 + times more. They do have tools that cost way way more but if you dont need those features dont buy those levels.

[Laertes]

I work in a medium-sized(1.5k employees but with a rather small electronics engineering team) aerospace company using Altium only for Schematics/PCB and we've found that Altium Vault is absolutely not worth the money.

Almost all the features of the vaults, if not all, can just as well be managed using Subversion(which Altium supports quite nicely on it's own, actually) and maybe a few scripts.
If the company already has reasonable infrastructure(i.e. subversion already there, carefully managed repositories with differentiated access rights etc., CIFS shares set up via policies on all computers so everyone uses the same absolute paths...) then all you need is to spend a little time on setting everything up for an ideal work enviroment with Subversion, while Vaults force you to pay perpetually and it's not cheap at all.

Also, Altium Vaults do not integrate well with other software or databases, like our own stock and suppliers database, it's much easier to set everything up if all your Altium Parts are simply in a Database Library that you can control. Same goes with mechanical and cable design(we use E3 for hydraulics and cable harness plans and Autodesk products for all mechanical stuff) - it just integrates more seamless if you have everything tailored to your specific needs, especially since Altium and Autodesk, especially if you have competent IT people to get the databases up and running.