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creating typical bills of material for steel design in SOLIDWORKS

Bills of material are an important following process for steel design. Many typical steel design BOM’s are not possible to create by using the standard functions of SOLIDWORKS.

The special features of SolidSteel parametric for SOLIDWORKS are closing this gap and enable to create typical bills of material for structural steel design in SOLIDWORKS.


Exporting Excel BOM’s

Bills of Material can be exported to Excel. Therefor an usual Microsoft Excel document will be created and all of the Excel functions are available for an subsequent processing. For this export individual templates can be used. Those templates control the the look as well as the content of the bill of material.

Extract of the possible contents: position number, assembly, name, weight, commercial weight, coat area, cutting information, amout and many more. In addition to the usual entries of the bill of material, random user specific properties can be added to the Excel BOM’s.

Position numbers can be assigned automatically as well as manually. Many user defined settings like the allocation of special number ranges for different parts or the selection of individual separators complements this process.

The used templates are build up in a clear XML scheme and can be built up by the end user or by the sales partner depending on the personal XML knowledge. A usual excel sheet can be used as an individual header. This header may contain a logo, the address, order number and many other general information.


Creating internal SOLIDWORKS BOM’s

If you don't want an Excel Export for your bills of material or if you want to have the bill of material on you SOLIDWORKS drawing, you can do that by using the standard SOLIDWORKS functions. All the necessary data are written into the user specific part properties. So its possible to create typical bills of material for structural steel design in SOLIDWORKS. Therefor you can create SOLIDWORKS templates for bills of material.

By using the SolidSteel parametric position numbers, you can also use the geometrical detection for similar parts. This is even possible for welded component assemblies, not only for single parts.



Position numbers

The award process of position numbers is an important aspect of the creation of bills of material. In SolidSteel parametric for SOLIDWORKS the position numbers are awarded by an powerful algorithm. At the same time the geometrical detection for similar parts is running and checks if there are similar parts in the design. If yes, of cause they get the same position number.

If you change the design after the award of the position numbers, SolidSteel parametric checks if that has an effect on the position numbers of the parts. A possible conflict can be that there are different parts with a similar position number. Because of the intelligent management of the parts, the user will get an warning and is able to solve the conflict. So you can be sure to have always correct bills of material.