Eric's Take...

...on Inventor 10's "global" Bill of Material functionality.

For those of you who have long agonized over the limited capabilities and controls in Inventor assembly's Bill of Material and its lackluster relationships with presentations and drawing Parts Lists, Inventor 10 goes a long way toward fixing your issues.

We are all aware that the BOM in the assembly drives the Item Number that is displayed on the drawing when Ballooning components in a view of an assembly or a presentation. We also know that we can adjust the order (and thus the Item Number) by reordering the parts in the browser, but if we do that after creating a presentation or placing a parts list, we do not see those changes reflected in those views. This causes us to have to spend an unacceptable amount of time editing the parts list to override what the assembly is dicating to display the components with the Item Numbers we need them to show.

The Bill of Material in Inventor 10 addresses those issues and more, eliminating a significant amount of the workarounds we have come up with to control the assembly BOM and how it is displayed. To start with, we can choose which Properties, including Custom Properties, we want to display in the dialog and they stay there. We can then edit those Properties and have those changes pushed into the individual files, eliminating the need to use the Design Assistant or iProperties. We can even override Quantity to add spares or occurances we haven't modeled.

With the addition of the BOM Structure property, we can now correctly reflect how a component fits into the assembly, such as Normal (fabricated), Inseparable, Purchased, Phantom, or Reference. We can add components that have not or cannot be modeled, such as paint or lubricants, with Virtual Components.

Once our BOM is correctly represented in the assembly, we can Sort the BOM by any of the Properties discussed above. After sorting, we can Renumber the BOM to update those components with properly ordered numbering. For example, if we sort on BOM Structure, we can number all Normal components first and all Purchased components after.

Additionally, we can display both the Model and BOM structures in the same dialog. We can enable Parts Only mode to view the assembly without any of the Assembly Heirarchy. On the Export side, we can take the Structured or Parts Only assembly heirarchy out to a variety of data formats, including Excel and Access.

And with all these changes, the presentations will update based on changes made to the assembly BOM and the Parts List are more easily updated, while retaining their ability to display the BOM information as circumstances dictate.

Let's hear it, folks! Comments are welcome.