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.
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.