Counting every part down to the smallest screws, a single product can have 1000s of parts. Some of these parts are made by OEMs, however, companies use numerous suppliers that make many of these parts. Managing information about parts is a complex and cumbersome task.
Managing data about standard and engineering parts is a critical function in every manufacturing company. Doing so, however, is complex and tends to be very specific to an organization. openBOM extends the capabilities of design systems by providing a means for managing parts catalog which include all the required metadata linked to CAD models. Here are a few ideas and video demo of how openBoM removes the complexity of managing parts.
First, we will create an openBoM catalog from an Onshape Part Studio. For this example, we’ll use a publicly available fastener Part Studios. However, you can use any Onshape Part Studio to create a parts catalog. You do so by using the ‘Inventory’ option in openBoM. (BTW, ‘Inventory’ is probably not a good name; we plan to renamed it to ‘Parts Catalog’ soon.)
After the Parts Catalog is created, we customize it by adding metadata to it. You can add specific metadata using custom properties such as your company Part Number, Manufacturer information, Supplier, Tech specs, etc. openBoM is completely flexible giving you the ability to add this information to a catalog at any time. Moreover, all updates happen in real time. There are no multiple copies or files to track or manage.
Once done adding custom properties, let’s transition to an Onshape assembly. We use parts from the Parts Catalog created from the fastener Part Studio and insert them into an assembly.
And now, the final stage of my example. Let’s create a BOM for this assembly. And let’s assign a Parts Catalog (Inventory) to it so it’s used with this BOM to map the custom properties we added earlier. What you can see as a result are the custom properties from the part catalog you created and linked to the BOM. Also, you can now insert this BOM into an Onshape drawing.
Note: Updating custom data in a parts catalog automatically updates the BOM and the Onshape drawing.
The mechanism demonstrated can be done for every CAD system integrated with openBoM. However, examples shown herein are unique because of our tight integration with Onshape.The advantage of Onshape as the first full-cloud CAD system is to provide a way to effectively and easily link CAD information stored online. (We are going to do something similar with Solidworks PDM Professional in the coming openBoM release.)
Oleg, 17 June 2017