GoEngineer Blog

As a SOLIDWORKS instructor, I am often asked, “Can I show cut list item information in an assembly BOM?” The answer is yes, but with a little work. Weldments and multi-body sheet metal parts utilize a cut list to call out individual component material and other pertinent information. Here is an assembly that contains a welded table and purchased components that are mounted before shipping.

Create a SOLIDWORKS Bill of Materials from your desired view. Hover over your BOM without clicking and then click the arrow plus sign icon in the top left corner as shown in the picture below to highlight all of your BOM. Then, without moving your mouse, right-click and go to Formatting. The under Formatting, select Entire Table.

The Bill of Materials (BOM) will not directly associate a specific component feature dimension to a BOM cell. However, when we associate a Custom Property to a dimension, we can use that in the BOM. For reference, I have a simple assembly with a base block, three dowel pins, and three sliders. Each of the sliders has the same physical length, but we want to have the slot length for each slider displayed in the BOM.

SOLIDWORKS Manage provides greater flexibility than we’ve known with just PDM in terms of exporting data. We’ve previously covered exporting record item data, so now we’ll extend that by including BOM data. When exporting BOM information, we’re limited to a number of fields for the child along with all properties from the parent. 

 

Did you know you can compare non-Excel-based BOM's (Bill of Materials) in SOLIDWORKS? The BOM Compare tool is helpful to those who have multiple versions of an assembly and require the ability to compare the difference between two BOMs at a time. The Compare tool is located under Tools>Compare>BOM. Once open, you can select the Referenced Document and the Modified Document.

SOLIDWORKS PDM includes a whole set of tools for Bill of Materials beyond what we’re used to in SOLIDWORKS alone. Using these tools, we have options for differing formatting and new ways to export and compare. We can even treat bills as their own entities without completely losing the parametric link between a model and BOM. Let’s explore some of these options.

In this tutorial, learn how to get the total length of a bent pipe in your SOLIDWORKS BOM (Bill of Materials) in just three steps. Chances are you used a Sweep feature to create your pipe part model, hence having a “path” sketch. Edit the sketch and make sure you have a length for the straight segments and any splines. The spline length dimension is only available in SOLIDWORKS 2014 and newer versions.

 

The value of the quantities in SOLIDWORKS PDM computed BOMs are determined by the reference count of the file. For some, you may need to show an amount or some non-integer value rather than a reference count. This document describes steps to set this up and have PDM computed BOMs display a value from a SOLIDWORKS Custom Property for the quantity rather than reference counts of the file.

SOLIDWORKS Electrical provides a method of organizing your electrical projects through the use of 'books'. These books can be used, for example, to separate sub-systems within a project. The default SOLIDWORKS Electrical Bill of Materials report (Bill of Materials grouped by manufacturer) includes the components from an entire project instead of consolidating the components and their quantities by the books defined.