Hi All,

I have recently come across an issue whilst trying to ensure that our BOMS are completely driven by SolidWorks, i.e. minimising human editing, hiding, moving etc.

We have started using the indented BOM to build our parts lists, which obviously groups the parts together into their relevant sub assemblies. My first question is, does anyone know of an automatic way to make it obvious where one sub assembly stops and the other begins, like a line break or a thicker line? (i am aware of the ability to manually insert lines after the BOM is created, but this can be a bit of a "faff").

My second question is, maybe slightly simpler; how do you stop parts being duplicated throughout the BOM? i.e. a part in assembly 1 (at the foot of the BOM) might be common to assembly 2 (at the top of the BOM) and it is bad pratice to have the part referenced twice. I have attached an image of an example of our final BOM layout (edited for commerical sensitivity purposes), as well as an example of how SolidWorks initially imports the information, complete with duplicates.

In our BOM, you can see that sub assembly 'BD/058-501-21' references both a 'BD/058-501-23' and a '3591-3CNP x .285' (which is part of the BD/058-501-31 sub assy). At the moment I am achieving this by manually "excluding parts from BOM" or hiding/deleting rows - not ideal and a bit of a "bodge".

Any help is appreciated, and feel free to ask more questions, many thanks in advance.