Manufacturing > Family Tables > About Working With Family Tables
  
About Working With Family Tables
Family tables are collections of similar parts, assemblies, or features but may differ slightly in one or two aspects, such as size or detail features. Family tables enable you to use standardized components by representing the part inventory in Creo Parametric. You can also easily interchange parts and subassemblies in an assembly, because instances from the same family are automatically interchangeable with each other.
You can use family tables in Creo NC to change dimensions, features, components, parameters, groups, and pattern tables in the manufacturing model and quickly generate a family of parts as follows:
Generate tool paths for a generic part
Create a family table and swap different reference models and workpieces
Open a manufacturing instance
Output the tool paths
If you add an NC step to the family table, its child features are managed automatically. They are suppressed when the step is not included in a particular instance, and resumed when it is.
 
* A feature is suppressed if a required reference for the feature does not exist in the production family table instance or if the reference is not mapped automatically.
In a family table, you can use the feature-level parameters PTC_MFG_PRM_CL_FILE and PTC_MFG_PRM_PARTNO for all NC sequence and operation features. These parameters correspond to the NCL_FILE and PARTNO manufacturing parameters, respectively. Changes in the table to the values of any of these parameters result in a change in the corresponding parameter. The PTC_MFG_PRM_CL_FILE parameter is used to change the name of the CL file. The value of PTC_MFG_PRM_PARTNO determines the PARTNO/<value> statement in the CL data for an NC sequence or operation.
 
* You can also update the comments in the CL file by adding the DESCRIPTION parameter for an NC step, that is, by creating the note and updating the note ID in the family table.