From Vault to Forma: what travels and what does not

I have spent years moving data inside Autodesk Vault: lifecycles, properties, BOM, releases. And more and more conversations end with the same question: how do I get this into Forma?

Before going further, a clarification that matters to me: I do not yet have a production project connecting both worlds. This article is not a success story. It is the honest exploration of someone who works on both sides: manufacturing PDM on one, large scale CDE configuration on the other.

Why this question comes up now

More and more companies have one foot in each world. They manufacture structures, equipment or systems that end up installed on a construction site. Their engineering lives in Vault, with Inventor and AutoCAD; their construction project lives in a CDE like Forma, with coordinated models, reviews and approvals. And at the border between the two, almost always, someone is copying files by hand.

What travels well

Files and their versions. A well built bridge can move the content and preserve the history. That is the easy part, and it is the only part most people call "migrating". If the bridge respects versions, it is already above average.

What does not travel on its own

Lifecycle states. "Released" in Vault is a sacred border: it separates what can be manufactured from what cannot. That concept does not exist natively on the other side. Someone has to decide what "released" means in the CDE: a published folder? a review state? an attribute?

iProperties. Part number, material, description, author: in the CDE those become attributes that must be defined, with ISO 19650 style naming that someone has to design and maintain. Without that mapping, files arrive mute.

BOM context and links. An assembly is not a file: it is a network of references. If the bridge does not translate that context, the destination ends up with a collection of loose files that look complete and are not.

Permissions. The security model of a PDM and that of a CDE do not translate one to one. Who can see what, and in which state, has to be redesigned on the Forma side with roles and folder inheritance.

My thesis: the bridge needs the same defenses as an agent

Building VaultPilot together with Avant Leap I learned a rule that applies exactly here: no automated process should write into a production system without a dry-run, without validation against the real schema of the destination and without an audit trail for every write. A bridge between PDM and CDE is precisely that: an automated process writing into production. Without those three defenses it is not a bridge. It is a bet.

Where I would start

If I had to start this bridge tomorrow, the first step would not be code: it would be an inventory of which properties are actually used in the Vault and who consumes them on the site side. Then, defining the attribute mapping with the BIM team, on top of naming people can actually fill in. And only then, testing with a small subset in a test hub, measuring what gets lost and adjusting before touching production.

If your company lives on this border between manufacturing and site, I am interested in your case: which data gets trapped, what you have tried and where it broke.