How to Get Part Numbers in SolidWorks: A Practical Close to the Identifiers and AI Series

Across the previous four articles in this series, I made a case that can sound almost philosophical. A Part Number is not an ID. It is an identity decision. It is the moment a company decides that this thing is a thing it will recognize, buy, build, revise, and remember. I argued that filenames are not identity, that spreadsheets quietly erode identity over time, and that AI cannot reason about a product whose parts keep changing names depending on who saved the file last.

All of that holds up. But identity decisions are not made in whitepapers. They are made inside SOLIDWORKS, late in the afternoon, when an engineer finishes an assembly and has to decide what happens next. So I want to close this series where the work actually happens: in the add-in, in the feature tree, in the two or three clicks that either build clean product data or quietly create the mess we spend years cleaning up later.

This is the practical chapter. Same argument, but now with the dialogs, the buttons, and the everyday workflow that turns a SOLIDWORKS assembly into AI-ready product data.

If you are arriving here without the rest of the series, here is the path that led to this one:

Will AI Kill the Smart Part Number? makes the core argument that AI removes the last excuse for encoding meaning into the number itself.

Where Should the Part Number Live? Lessons From Real OpenBOM Onboarding Sessions shows, through onboarding scenarios, where each piece of meaning actually belongs.

Why Part Numbers Became Smart, and Why Search, Sharing, and AI Will Change Their Role explains why smart numbers ever existed and why search and connected data change the job they do.

How to Design Part Numbering for the AI Era lands the principle the whole series was building toward: do not design a smarter number, design a smarter system around a simple number.

This article is the practical follow-through. The principle, now executed inside SOLIDWORKS.

The Hardest Part of Part Numbering Is the “Extra Click” Nobody Wants to Make

When I work with teams onboarding onto OpenBOM, the conversation about Part Numbers almost never starts as a data architecture conversation. It starts as a friction conversation. An engineer tells me that the official numbering process exists, that there is a document describing it somewhere, and that nobody follows it consistently because it takes too long in the middle of real work.

This is the part that gets underestimated. Good Part Number management does not fail because people disagree with it. It fails because the act of doing it correctly is slower than the act of doing it badly. If generating a number means clicking through several confirmation pop-ups while trying to remember which property to write into, engineers will route around the process. They will type a value into a field, promise themselves they will fix it later, and move on. Multiply that by a few hundred parts and a few months, and you have the exact data problem that makes downstream BOMs, procurement, and AI unreliable.

So the first practical truth is tricky and hard. The biggest enemy of clean item identity is not bad intentions. It is “clicks”. That is why the most useful recent work we have done in the SOLIDWORKS add-in is not a new feature at all. It is the removal of friction from the features that were already there.

A Part Number Should Come From a Catalog, Not a Keyboard

Before the workflow, the principle. A Part Number that an engineer types directly into a property field is a guess. It might be unique. It might follow the convention. It might collide with something a colleague created last week. Nobody knows until later, which is the worst possible time to find out.

OpenBOM takes a different position. In SOLIDWORKS, you generate Part Numbers from a Catalog, and you store the generated value in the right SOLIDWORKS property, for example a configuration-specific property. That single design choice changes what a Part Number is. It stops being a string somebody remembered and becomes a value the system issued, recorded, and connected to an item that already lives in your BOM, your procurement records, and your supplier data.

This is the bridge the whole series has been pointing at. SOLIDWORKS is very good at managing geometry and files. It was never designed to manage item identity, because identity is a company decision, not a modeling decision. OpenBOM sits in that gap. You assign Part Numbers directly inside the add-in where the engineer already works, and those numbers are immediately real everywhere else.

Generating Part Numbers: One Dialog, One Confirmation, One Clear Result

The Generate Part Number dialog in the OpenBOM add-in for SOLIDWORKS was redesigned around the friction problem. Previously, completing the operation meant confirming a series of warning pop-ups before anything actually happened. The warnings were not wrong. They were just scattered across the workflow in a way that trained people to click through them without reading.

Now the relevant settings and warnings live in a single dialog. You review the options once, and clicking Generate Part Numbers is the confirmation step. There is no chain of additional pop-ups standing between you and the result.

The practical workflow looks like this:

1. Open your assembly and click Generate Part Number in the OpenBOM ribbon inside SOLIDWORKS.
2. In the dialog, choose the Catalog that will issue the Part Numbers.
3. Choose where the value is saved, for example a configuration-specific property.
4. Set the behavior you want: generate across the assembly structure, recurse into sub-assemblies, create new Part Numbers for existing items, and decide how renamed files are handled.
5. Click Generate Part Numbers. That click is the confirmation.
6. Review the Part Number Assignment Results summary, then close.

That results summary is the second half of the redesign, and it matters more than it looks. After generation, OpenBOM shows you what actually happened: the totals for All, Assigned, Skipped, and Failed items per file. Instead of clicking through dialogs and then guessing whether the operation did what you intended, you get one screen that tells you the truth. Trust in a process comes from visibility. When people can see the outcome, they stop avoiding the tool.

You can watch this exact flow here: Part Number generation workflow.

Existing Parts Are Where Real Companies Live

Demos always start with a clean assembly and no history. Real companies never do. Almost every team I onboard already has parts with numbers, items already sitting in catalogs, and a layer of inconsistency that built up over years of file-based and spreadsheet-based work. A Part Number tool that only works on a blank slate is useless to them.

This is why the generation dialog gives you control over how existing items are handled rather than forcing one rigid behavior. A team migrating into OpenBOM can decide, deliberately, what the operation is allowed to touch. Do not overwrite Part Numbers that already exist. Skip files that already map to valid item records. Generate new numbers only for the items that are genuinely missing them. Create new Part Numbers for renamed files when that is actually the right call.

The point is not that OpenBOM has an opinion about your numbering policy. The point is that it lets you enforce your policy without manual triage. During a migration, that control is the difference between cleaning up your data and accidentally creating a second mess on top of the first one.

Save Item Now Does Two Jobs at Once

Engineers rarely work on an entire assembly in one pass. They work in increments. They finish a sub-assembly, they fix a bracket, they add three purchased components, and they want to commit just those items without reprocessing everything around them.

The redesigned Save Item dialog in the SOLIDWORKS add-in was built for exactly that rhythm. It reduces clicks, it supports multiselect, and it lets you generate Part Numbers and save the selected items in a single operation. The workflow is direct: open an assembly, select the items you want in the feature tree, click Save Item, and generate the numbers and save in one step.

This sounds like a small convenience, and on any given afternoon it is. But the cumulative effect is what counts. When assigning a Part Number and saving an item is one fluid action on a handful of selected parts, the correct workflow becomes the fast workflow. That is the only version of a process that survives contact with a real deadline.

You can see the combined Save Item and Part Number flow here: Save Item with Part Number generation.

Clean Identity Is the Cheapest AI Investment You Will Make

This series ends on Part Numbers and AI because Part Numbers are one of the most practical, least glamorous places where AI readiness is either won or lost.

An AI agent cannot reason about a product whose identity is ambiguous. If the same physical part shows up under three filenames, two spreadsheet rows, and a hand-typed property value, the agent has no reliable way to know whether it is looking at one part or three. Every downstream task that we want AI to help with, comparing BOMs, finding duplicates, flagging missing data, analyzing cost changes, explaining what changed and why, depends on the system having a stable reference for each item. That stable reference is the Part Number.

This is also where Part Numbers connect to Product Memory, which is the larger idea behind everything we build. A Part Number is not the whole memory of a product. It is the anchor that lets the rest of the memory attach to something solid. Decisions, revisions, supplier choices, and cost history are only reusable if they are tied to an identity that does not drift. Get the anchor right, and an AI agent inherits clean context for free. Get it wrong, and no amount of model sophistication will save the analysis.

The encouraging part is how concrete the starting point is. You do not need an AI strategy to begin. You need a Catalog, a couple of well-chosen settings, and the discipline of generating numbers from inside SOLIDWORKS instead of typing them into a field.

Conclusion: The Foundation You Build on a Tuesday

Part Number management gets discussed as a high-level data governance topic, and at the architecture level it is one. But for SOLIDWORKS users it begins as something far more ordinary. Open an assembly. Choose a Catalog. Generate Part Numbers. Save the items you care about. Read the results. Trust that the connection between your CAD files, your items, and your BOMs is now real rather than aspirational.

The recent OpenBOM improvements for SOLIDWORKS make that loop faster and harder to get wrong. The redesigned Generate Part Number and Save Item dialogs cut the clicks, consolidate the warnings into one decision, support working on just the items you select, and show you exactly what happened when you are done.

That is the whole argument of this series, reduced to its smallest practical form. Good product data, and the AI that will eventually depend on it, is not built in a strategy meeting. It is built on a Tuesday afternoon, one well-managed Part Number at a time, inside the tool where engineers already work.

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Best, Oleg