BOM from part drawings like in Tekla

Noah_Stoop

Hi everyone,

I’m currently comparing Tekla and Onshape and I’m wondering if it’s possible in Onshape to place a Bill of Materials (BOM) directly on a part drawing, similar to how it works in Tekla.

In Tekla, the part drawing immediately shows:

• Which assemblies the part is used in
• How many times it needs to be produced

This is extremely useful for production and planning, since you don’t have to go back to the assembly every time to check that information.

My questions:

• Is there a way to achieve this in Onshape, either through existing functionality or some kind of workaround?
• Or are there any plans to add such a feature?

I believe that custom features for drawings would be a great improvement to Onshape. That would allow users to develop and share these kinds of functionalities, just like we can already do with Part Studios.

Is anyone else interested in this, or has maybe found a clever solution already?

Thanks in advance!

Caden_Armstrong

Custom tables would support this functionality.
https://cad.onshape.com/help/Content/custom_tables.htm

Onshape has recently added the ability to add custom tables into drawings.

martin_kopplow

Difficult topic and has been discussed a lot in my previous job. My understanding is that a part drawing can have no BOM because a part drawing will only have one part. So, a list of one parts makes no sense here. Whenever multiple parts are involved, we have an assembly, and there we also have a BOM.

I know the shop always wants to know how many parts are required, and they would ideally want to read that on the drawing. The same goes for the sales and the buying office. But that is not a BOM, then, that's rather a 'where am I used list' and a completely different thing.

A part can also not have a 'how many am I' property, because it cannot know where it is used: In one assembly, the whole project or in a year worth of production? All the part drawings would have to be updated each time a client orders one more assembled unit and whenever one completed unit has left works. Next day, I might re-use the same part for yet a different project, too. Who's going to manage that?

Therefore I have always objected putting the count on the drawing. That's what post-it and pencils are for. ;0)

I could, though, imagine a tool that takes the individual part count out of the project's top level BOM and throws it back onto each part drawing. In an environment where everybody is using a digital access to drawings (that is: no paper), and where drawings are exclusively organzied on a per-project basis, this appears manageable and could be a good compromise between design and shop floor. This would require a master assembly be defined for the project, though, as well as probably project specific drawing templates.