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How are people dealing with things that are measured by length on a BOM?
eric_pesty
Member Posts: 1,844 PRO
A concrete example I am dealing with is gaskets: we often use adhesive gaskets that come on a roll and may have several different cut bits to make door seal.
We do want the CAD model for the gasket but we end up with several parts that should all have the part number of the gasket. However in ERP we have the part number is for "1 foot" of gasket so even if we make it a configured part with the length being "excluded from properties", we will end with say qty 4 if we have 4 pieces (regardless of their length).
Currently these quantities are over-ridden outside of CAD but it means we have to manually set the quantity (and manually update it we change the design…)
Answers
Hi Eric,
We have the same issue, for now we deal with it outside of Onshape but it's people dependent and prone to mistakes. The best workaround from time to time is to use virtual components. They can be setup to show length instead of quantity of an item. But even with this, we don't have a proper way to automate the process up to the order. We still have to treat it manually.
For a gasket material, I would think that a special custom feature could be created which would take edges and/or curves and model sweeps which are all separate parts, but somehow it tallies up the overall length.
Computing the total length from the CAD model is the "easy" part. What to do with BOM and part numbers is the tricky bit…
The BOM would need the ability to support overriding the "quantity" with a custom property…
@eric_pesty Now that configurations can be rolled into a single part number, I was assuming there would be a config that would be a single part with the total length. That would be what would show up on the BOM. Definitely a bunch of overhead to make it happen, but it seems like we're closer.
Right so you would have QTY1 of "Gasket, 7.3ft", or whatever. You'd still need a manual edit somewhere to get the correct qty of gasket in ERP but that would help… You could probably create a new column with the length property and maybe have some rule in the ERP input to convert that to a correct "quantity"…
I guess you wouldn't even need the "exclude from properties" as you would just have the one part with the rolled up qty included in the BOM (and set the other ones to exclude from BOM). Otherwise you would end up with QTY 4 of "Gasket, 7.3ft" which would be misleading. Creating a composite might be another way but it's a different approach (i.e. not inserting different lengths of the same part in the assembly), at least you could use FS to compute that length property (with different level of automation depending how much effort you put into it)…
Thanks for the input, I definitely have some things to think about!
@Pat_Couture , the "items" way doesn't seem to provide a lot of benefit if you still have to input the value manually, I guess it does remove the need from manual editing downstream so that's something…