From Designer Central to POWER’BY UPS, Without Stopping Operations

The migration was not one move but two, and they could not be done at once. The platform had to come up from 2017x to 2021x first, and only then could CATIA V5 data be taken out of Designer Central and into POWER’BY UPS. Two findings changed the shape of the work. A root assembly turned out to hold numerous revisions of the same reference. And every revision coming out of Designer Central carried an identical file name — which UPS cannot accommodate, because it will not hold multiple CAD items with the same file name in a single CATIA session, and the assemblies simply failed to open.

Phase one delivered the upgrade to 2021x in three days, using ANT scripts configured and tested in advance, with CATIA V5 integration still running through Designer Central. Phase two moved the CATIA V5 data across to POWER’BY UPS. SmarTeam data was handled separately, with customised mapping and transformation so it could be migrated on demand between business units and customers rather than all at once. The duplicate file names were resolved in code, so the latest structure loaded consistently, and the 25 affected assemblies had their references corrected by hand to point at the current revisions.