Raw Material Library with Productstream and AutoCAD Mechanical Bill of Materials

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  Brian Schanen joined Autodesk in 2005 as a Product Designer and currently is a Customer Success Engineer for Autodesk’s Data Management products. Brian has taught at Autodesk University numerous times and has authored white papers on Vault and Productstream. He works with customers to implement a complete digital prototyping solution specializing in Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk Vault and Productstream. Brian lives near Detroit, Michigan.

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  Raw Material Library with Productstream and AutoCAD Mechanical Bill of Materials
  December 18, 2008, 05:15 PM Brian Schanen

  This article is for you if you manage raw materials as sub-entities of your items in the bill of material. I’ll describe a way for you to build a library containing raw materials which are then easy to pick from. This will allow you to completely build your bill of material in AutoCAD Mechanical and offer it to downstream users via Productstream.

  So how is it done?

  First of all you need a library of raw materials. This is achieved by creating a drawing that contains the following for each raw material: a part reference that contains the data – make sure to use the PSEQUIVALENCE value if you want to map to pre-existing items in Productstream. Also include a “Type” field to map against the TYPE property in Productstream – this will allow you to generate raw material items when they are used and map to the correct item type. See this blog post on how to setup custom types and drive from AutoCAD or Inventor.

  

  Then place a border surrounding the part reference. Each border must contain one part reference only. Create a BOM for each border, and edit the assembly properties. Here you can assign the name you want to appear in your raw material selection lists later on.

  

  And how do I use it?

  When you want to add a raw material to any AutoCAD Mechanical part reference simply click on Attach in the Part Reference dialog.

  

  Then select the drawing containing your raw materials library.

  

  You can select the materials from the Table Name drop down list. The names correspond with the BOM names in your raw materials library drawing. Make sure to update your BOM after each insert of a part reference with raw materials, to keep the item number of the raw material adjacent to the part itself.

  What does the result look like?

  The raw material will appear as a child of the part reference you’ve inserted. This shows the dependency “Generator base plate is made of material Steel, mild”

  

  You should note that the “raw materials” drawing will become an external reference (XREF). This will allow you to later update your materials library to add or modify materials.

  And In Productstream?

  Each raw material that does not have an item already will be assigned an item. Make sure to use the PSEQUIVALENCE field in AutoCAD Mechanical to link to an existing item. You’ll also get an item for the materials library itself. You can release this item to ensure the library is not edited.

  

  Conclusion

  Using a simple library drawing you can ensure consistent data in your bill of materials, and allow quick and easy adding of raw material data. This means also making it available to downstream users through Productstream, as it will also capture this information!

  PS: Please refer to this previous blog posts for additional information around AutoCAD Mechanical and property mapping:

  http://mfgcommunity.autodesk.com/blogs/blog/view/5/The_Key_AutoCAD_Mechanical/

  Thanks Thomas!

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