BOM and PDM management discussion.

Discussion created by Josh Hixon on Dec 14, 2018
Latest reply on Nov 21, 2019 by Tyler Harding

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I would like to discuss how others keep their BOMs accurate and in line with other file management systems. How you deal with discontinued parts. How you deal with Sloppy or messy PDM vaults that you have taken over. How you deal with Assemblies containing standard parts as well as Raw materials as it relates to the BOM.

I want to hear from you guys if you have similar issues and how you are resolving them. If you have suggestions on ways to clean things up faster or major issues you may see with the current plan. Thank you all in advance for your highly valuable input!!

What we do and some of our struggles:

Currently, we use Sage as an inventory management software, therefore our BOMs get saved out as .csv files to be uploaded into that system.

We have two methods in use (trying to get to one) to save the .csv file.

One is saving out the BOM from the drawing as an excel spreadsheet, the data is then copied to another spreadsheet that manipulates the data and saves it as a new .csv file.
The second method is a macro that compiles a BOM from the assembly and saves it as a .csv file, taking all raw materials directly from the cut lists of their part.

The struggle in PDM: We have had three different Admins over 15 years with three different ideas on file management. we also had a transition from workgroup PDM to PDM professional. With nearly half a million parts in the vault, and easily 50 thousand standard parts with various naming conventions and file structures, BOMs are a giant time suck and have issues almost always. Here are some issues we are trying to solve.

Old standard raw material parts that should be weldments are drawn as sweeps, leaving no Cultists for the Macro and the accuracy of typed in properties is questionable.
Many reused models have standard parts that have two files for the same part, ie. 1234 and 1234 old.
Some hardware has multiple configurations with slopy configuration specific properties that cause odd and sometimes wrong part information in the BOMs
Weldment profiles have moved or been edited multiple times over the past 10 years leaving standard parts linking to old weldment data.
An issue that has been tackled pretty well already but still hits from time to time are standard parts that look great until we send a BOM on and it comes back with parts that have been discontinued. (Sloppy file management for many years caused many of these parts to still exist in standard library locations.)

Plan of action for PDM woes:

Drafting standards have been created to make sure all Solidworks users are on the same page so to speak. (There were no drafting standards for nearly 15 years of modeling)
From the Top level of the Vault, a new file structure has been built to create a clean environment for new and custom products. In this new structure inventory parts are not allowed to enter until they have been gone through and brought up to the standards.
New templates are in progress for our made to fit products.
The BOM macro is being used by me only so legacy issues can be fixed as they come up. (the long slow process that I want to improve the most)

I will post to this as other issues come up or as new solutions to problems are found.

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Seth Gunnells Dec 17, 2018 8:50 AM
Replying mostly so that I can keep up with the future of this post, hopefully it gains traction and more people will join the conversation. I'm glad somebody is talking about this, this is hard information to find since it varies greatly from company to company depending on the type of product they make. I think it would be great if everyone mentions what sort of space their product occupies, ours is Industrial Machines for Handling and Packaging and we are the manufacturer of those machines in house as well.

We are in the process right now of switching over from Autocad 2D to Solidworks, so a huge leap in potential. I'm the new guy in the office and have the most recent experience with Solidworks though others in the office have used Inventor and even Sketchup. Setting these processes up correctly the first time will be hugely beneficial in the long run so we are taking our time with it.

Do you have any experience in dealing with old parts that were previously made in 2D and will be created in 3D with a new drawing? How do you handle revisions of those parts then, would you make that part in 3D a revision of the 2D version just so you have separation there? These would be standard parts that are being updated as we continue to make the product better, so it's best not to give it a new part number, but if that's the proper direction then that's what we would do.

We have a very old Made2Manage system for handling inventory and Job Orders, so importing bill of materials may not be possible directly. Any ideas of a way to get this to work would be appreciated. As in, would you have to export to excel spreadsheet first and if so, then how do you handle revising the spreadsheet and making sure it stayed up to date as well.

One of our engineers was able to manipulate the toolbox so that all the fastener part numbers/descriptions would match our Made2Manage system, so that was a big help, though the Toolbox is still glitchy at times.

Our drafting standards are well established for Autocad and we are trying to convert that as best we can over to Solidworks, which as you can imagine takes a lot customization.

When you say "New templates are in progress for our made to fit products", are you saying somehow you have templates for the 3D model being made so that it is modeled the same every time? How do you do this?

Also, do you have to deal with any "CMD" parts as in parts that use the same part number but could vary in dimension? Such as a tube that is used in one assembly as 12" and then the next time it's used is 14" but they share the same part number? If so, how do you handle these? We thought we could use the design table and excel driven parts manipulator but its really cumbersome , then we thought we would use configurations, which seems okay but then we get weird results when loading an assembly that uses it and need to make sure it doesn't freak out in the next assembly.

Thanks again for the post and look forward to any more replies in here.
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- Josh Hixon @ Seth Gunnells on Dec 17, 2018 11:57 AM
  So to answer a couple of your questions first:
  
  Templates- Some of our products are customizable per application. Soin one product there are a couple of subassemblies that never change, and it all gets assembled the same at the top level. There is a welded frame that changes to make the product fit on different pool decks, as well as some customizable logos. So we have one assembly that is perfect, all the parts and drawings are clean and BOMs pull 100 percent correctly. This model gets renamed (everything that gets changed) and used for every new custom product. Leaving drawings with only a few dimensions to clean up before sending it out.
  
  Revisioning and 2D to 3D- since you are Just starting out in SolidWorks as a company, USE SOLIDWORKS PDM!! It is worth every second and every penny invested into it. If you don't already start now! This makes revisioning easy and allows you to lock standard parts from being edited; along with tons of other features to save time and mistakes. since you are going to a 3d model, it will be a new file but can maintain the same part number. As far as previous revisions, others may have more experience with that. In PDM you can set your revision to match your current build revision though. So old revisions would just have to refer to your old 2d drawings.
  
  CMD parts- I would need to understand how your system works a bit better to make a great call on the best way to do it. My gut tells me weldments are going to be one of the best ways for what you are describing. configurations are good if there are only a handful of sizes for said part. If it is custom per build, put the part in an assembly, and at the assembly level, make a cut for the desired application. (for use with parts only BOM)
  
  Hope this helps!!
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  - Seth Gunnells @ Josh Hixon on Dec 17, 2018 1:50 PM
    I believe that our welded assemblies may be far too complex to use templates with customizable properties. I read another post you made about making the data card drive global variables in the part which would be great if we could get it robust enough to handle some of our "standard" sub assemblies.
    
    We definitely are using Solidworks PDM which seems to work pretty well. About setting PDM to match your current build revision, do you have a decent way of referring back to the original drawing? We were thinking about adding this as custom property to go into the title block. We are slightly limited in that only the admins, engineering, and shop manager has access to any of the files in the vault as we are not paying for extra seats. So we will have to export a lot of drawings out of the vault, which sounds like a mess.
    
    Our CMD's can be a bit tricky. We denote a handful of CMDs to a drawing which might be based on the size of product roll that our system is handling and can drive QTY or lengths depending on how the drawing is set up. A welded assembly may consist of upwards of 50 pieces and 12 of those might have CMD driven lengths which of course affects the welded assembly's final dimensions for that particular version. We've attempted to do this with spreadsheets/design table with global variables and with configurations. I think in the end we're going to end up with master assemblies that we cut to fit and then save off as project specific parts.
    
    How are you handling logos and decals? Do you have a part number associated with your logos and do they get automatically populated in your BOM? If the logo is always on a flat surface then it's easy to make a part and just stick it in the assembly, but if it goes on a curved surface then you would prefer the mapping to surface of a decal, but those don't show up in non-shaded assemblies on the drawing and also don't have a part number to automatically populate the BOM.
    
    Thanks for all the feedback!
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    - Josh Hixon @ Seth Gunnells on Dec 17, 2018 5:04 PM
      I can not stress enough that ALL of your SolidWorks users should have contributor licenses to PDM. PDM keeps every version of the files you work on. So if you check out a file make a change and check it back in, that is one version. you could do that ten times and go back to all ten versions at any time. But if you are pulling them out of PDM, not only are you going to mess up file references at a massive level for the size assemblies you are working with, and you do not get to keep all those versions. Pulling files out of PDM to work on them is almost worse than not just not having PDM I think. That could be a major nightmare. I would love to get other PDM users opinions on this as well!
      
      Now, as far as referring back to original drawings are you talking referring to the Autocad drawings? There is not a way I know of to directly refer to those other than entering it in as a custom property as you have mentioned.
      
      CMD's, it is really tough to make a good suggestion on this without understanding how these work. Are these using the same part number each time because that part number refers to a raw material that is tracked in feet? or is it a set length part that gets modified per application and is tracked as a set number of parts in inventory? These small things all make a difference in how it is to be modeled and used in future models so as to keep an accurate inventory.
      
      Our Logos are drawn as a separate part to match the shape of the part they are on. The decal gets added on that part, and the part goes into the assembly. An alternative would be to have a part that is empty and has the part number you need in the BOM, then add your decal in the assembly. Without doing shaded view, there is not a good way to show decals in drawings that is true.
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      - Seth Gunnells @ Josh Hixon on Dec 17, 2018 5:36 PM
        Sorry about the confusion on PDM stuff, of course nothing is being worked on outside of the Vault. Anything that we save outside of the vault is for varying levels of the manufacturing and purchasing, because they won't have access to anything in the vault and can't change or save anything that really matters. For instance we will save DWG's out of the vault that are hopefully just as simple as exporting our solidworks drawings into DWG. Our purchaser wants this because she uses it to buy the items that need to be bought, and our shop workers like it because they can look up the drawing to get any dimensions we might have missed or for clarification on anything. Hopefully that last point will become less needed as we would be able to show more views easily in Solidworks compared to Autocad.
        
        Yes, I was saying we would like a way to link, or at least show reference to the autocad drawing which the new Solidworks model and drawing are based on as we will still be using the same or very similar standard parts. There are still some challenges here, as the way we do it today we may have Autocad drawings that have multiple assemblies as well as their detailed parts in the same file. This will have to change as we have decided the best course for Solidworks 3D is to only have one part per drawing per file (multiple views for assemblies is still fine obviously). As you can imagine this creates an issue when we only really need to model one part from an old drawing and want to keep the part number and the part number which used to be in numerical order in the previous drawing will now seem like an arbitrary number.
        
        Let's see if I can be more specific about our CMDs. A simple example would be for our conveyors. A belt conveyor will have a CMD for Length of conveyor, Width of conveyor, and leg height. Length and width will be determined by the product size that is for that project and the leg height is determined by the needs of the customer for their product handling height (many factors go into this but it is determined before we start engineering and manufacturing). So we have our standard lower level assemblies that use these CMDs. The overall assembly looks the same between some of these conveyors so we don't need multiple assemblies to show them in the drawing. The top level drawing will have dimensions that refer to the CMD as you would global variables in Solidworks and the cut lengths of the parts that use the CMDs is handled internally with our inventory data management. So one project might use three conveyors that have different lengths, each top level of those conveyors will have their respective CMDs, but the underlying welded sub-assembly will be the same part number (part number in this case is for the assembly). This is basically how all of our CMDs work but with varying degrees of difficulty, in some cases the CMD allows us to specify the first drill point in a series of holes depending on a length.
        
        Glad to see you have similar issues with showing the Logos as we do, I guess we'll just have to use a work around of some sort. Luckily our shop guys are good about knowing where all the warning stickers and logos should go and will usually get it right even if we forget to show them. You brought up a decent way of at least getting it into the BOM which is handy, thanks.
        
        Once again thanks for the input.
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    - Tyler Harding @ Seth Gunnells on Nov 21, 2019 12:55 PM
      Just to touch on labels and logos. We create parts for every label, filled out with custom properties for the BOM.
      
      To do this efficiently, we make standard logo files that are half done. These don't have to be pretty, but are purely for the BOM, and so that you can see a label in the drawing. We open the Logo Template, do a save as, and then fill out properties.
      
      If you have a particular label that needs to be wrapped around something in one case, and flat for another case we do the following:
      
      Make your standard logo. Save it as a part number. Now insert it into assembly, make it a Virtual Part, and then manipulate that logo (Flex Tool), and then exclude it from your BOM via part properties. Now insert your original logo, and hide it.
      
      This ties the standard flat logo file to your BOM, and the virtual part allows an assembly specific modification.
      
      As far as Data Management, we opted to fix our files as they get put into the vault. It's been a long year, but it's paying off. We still hand enter BOM's for parts in a separate ERP system, Macola. Hoping to get away from Macola or somehow have it read Solidworks BOMs. Looking at other options in the long term. Makes no sense to have the redundancy when the information is already correct (Hopefully) in Solidworks.
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Logan Pegler Dec 17, 2018 6:10 PM
Hi Josh,

Sounds like you've got a stressful future ahead if I'm honest. There isn't going to be a magic bullet that solves everything.
We recently migrated into SolidWorks PDM Pro and made the decision to start from scratch and check every file going in as many were completely underdefined, had errors etc. A year later and we are working with perfectly clean data and it has made our lives so much easier going forward. It was a painful process, but at the end of it all I don't think anyone involved regrets it now as we all have 100% confidence in the data we have and in the ECN processes going forward.
Based on our experience I can hopefully offer some tips that might help with the issues you listed.
-We are using Syspro ERP and similarly, creating the BoM in SYSPRO via macro that reads the SolidWorks assembly. This part works great for us, however we are not using cut lists as we track each individual part with separate part number and properties etc. We might need some more detail on your process here to help you sort that one out.
-For your weldment correction issue, if you don't trust the data in the properties, this one is going to be hard to solve without human interaction. Replacing the member with a weldment will almost certainly cause assemblies above to fall over. I'm not sure when you say you use cutlists whether each member is setup as individual parts or you are multibody part modelling. It will probably affect the way you tackle the issue.
-For the old files, this depends on how you wish to manage your files. In PDM you should really let the functionality retain the older revisions of the file and have no duplicates. If the part is different as such that it couldn't be retrofitted then we would create a completely new part number for it. If it is used in a one off project we would append the project number as a suffix to that part to differentiate it. It sounds like these old files should be cleaned up and archived out of the vault to me. Consider searching the vault for files containing "old", "archived" or whatever nomenclature you use to move them out.
-We have deleted all configuration specific properties from our vault. It's pretty easy to do this using #task. You'll just need to check out the files you need to fix, copy them into the #task dialog and use a task to delete them. (Make sure it is set to delete only config specific properties, and is set to run on all configurations.) Test it first of course, but its pretty easy to process large amounts of files by a check out, run task then check in over night. We had the same issue with these affecting our data cards and drawing title blocks. Pretty easy to fix.

As Seth mentions, it's a very hard topic to discuss, someone has to understand the entire process and how it affects the company. It's hard to cover off the whole thing on a forum/phone call, and expensive to get someone in to completely resolve the issue.
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Dan Harlan Jan 22, 2019 5:46 PM
The challenge I see with these types of issues is two fold;
1. Who's going to pay the "cost" to improve data quality?
2. When schedule is going to be impacted, does data quality still get a veto?

Some of the issues around #1 are things like; Does management realize the lost time due to existing poor data quality? Who's job is it to fix old stuff? Are you going to fix everything as part of a project, or just fix things on the next revision/release? And do you only fix those things that are getting revised, or do you have to fix all the components of the object that is getting released/revised?

Its easier to "understand" the impact of poor data quality, but until management has an emotional feel for it, they are not going to make the hard decisions that will upset people (i.e. enforcing the data quality rules). If you can tie poor data quality to something like a failed customer commitment, financial loss, legal losses, compliance failures, etc; then you are going to be able to get an executive sponsor who will say "We have to do X, I know its painful, but unless we want to go to jail the next time the FBI shows up, we will do this." (Worked at a company that had this issue.) When managers and executives see poor data quality as just another "cost of doing business" they will not stand behind the decisions needed. This plays heavily into #2.

At some point, if the data is going to get cleaned up, then it has to be cleaned up. Usually the only way to hold engineering's feet to the fire in this regards in when they want to release something. If data is going to be allowed to be released with poor quality to meet schedule or customer need etc, when is it going to get cleaned up? One way to allow such exceptions is to say that an ECR/ECN has to be created/submitted for the next revision to solve this before the existing rev can be released.

Another comment on this; people do what they are measured and rewarded for. If a manager gets praise and bonuses based upon on-time delivery, then they are being told that schedule is more important than quality. If a designer's annual review has metric on how many drawing they produce, then they are being told quantity is more important than quality. No matter what they are being told in meetings.

If you want good data quality, you have to measure it, report it, and reward it.
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BOM and PDM management discussion.

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