During top-down design, a product structure can be edited in Windchill. The resultant modifications are pushed to its associated CAD structure during a “reverse” build, and the CAD structure is considered to be “annotated”. The completion of the top-down design cycle is to open the annotated CAD structure in Creo Parametric and then check in the structure as modified. Because modifications have been made to the structure, Creo Parametric typically presents the Conflicts (check out on-the-fly) window to alert you that modification are in progress and a checkout is required.

In Creo Parametric, a configuration option (enable_show_changes = yes), allows a CAD designer opening an annotated CAD structure to see the View Changes window which lists the components edited in Windchill and allows the designer to accept or reject the changes originating in Windchill. When all changes have been addressed, the accepted changes are regenerated with the model and the rejected changes are not performed.