Bill of Materials management

The Bill of Materials is a key engineering deliverable. Without a complete and accurate Bill of Materials, manufacturing is unable to order the right parts and materials to build products. Simply put, Bill of Materials data is mission critical — one wrong digit in a part number or quantity can lead to serious financial waste.

Sometimes purchasing catches the error, for example if the BOM calls out a vendor part number that doesn't exist. Other errors — such as incorrect quantities — usually pass through unnoticed. While it can be bad if you order too many pieces, it's also bad if you order too few and manufacturing can't build the product.  When revenue is impacted, that means big trouble.

Historically, engineering departments have left the Bill of Materials to the last possible moment because engineers want to leave options open. As a result, the Bill of Materials is put together in a rush, which is exactly the type of situation that leads to errors.

To compound the problem, when companies design their products in 2D the Bill of Materials becomes a stand-alone or "dumb" document. Many companies create their parts lists in AutoCAD using tables and text. Others use Excel or Word to capture this important information. Because of the high stakes, companies must spend a lot of time checking and rechecking the Bill of Materials and even then, costly errors can still occur.

There must be a better way

Using Autodesk Inventor, the Bill of Materials is a view or rendition of the same 3D assembly model used to develop the new product. In other words, it's a view of the virtual prototype. As engineering modifies this virtual prototype — when adding or substituting parts, for example — the BOM is automatically kept up to date.

Autodesk Inventor's Bill of Materials helps increase the productivity of project members who create the detail drawings for manufacturing. When a designer adds a parts list to an Autodesk Inventor drawing, the parts list is populated automatically with data from the Inventor Bill of Materials and the item numbers used in the balloons are guaranteed to match the item numbers in the Bill of Materials. This means there is no need for manual data entry, which eliminates another traditional source of error.

Using the Bill of Materials that's integrated with Autodesk Inventor allows designers to:

• View the rolled up length of cut-length items – these are calculated automatically by the software
• Calculate the mass of consumable items such as lubricants or paint – also calculated automatically
• Track additional part information such as preferred vendor, CAGE code and surface finish, using custom iProperties
• Assign items numbers once using the Bill of Materials editor Seamlessly integrate with AutoDesk Productstream for engineering change and release management

Autodesk Inventor Bill of Materials is fully integrated with Autodesk Productstream. This integration enables the Productstream user to work with accurate engineering data, reducing the time required to prepare and validate the manufacturing Bill of Materials with faster approvals and release to manufacturing. Using the Bill of Materials that's integrated with Autodesk Inventor saves time, eliminates errors and increases productivity.