VIDEO: BOM with Purchased Assemblies from Solidworks using OpenBOM

One of the most typical scenarios I can see with many OpenBOM customers is related to management of purchased assemblies in the Bill of Materials. As much as it sounds simple, it is often creates difficulties to users. Such an assembly should be fully detailed in CAD (eg. Solidworks assembly), but at the same time, you only want to have a single line item in the BOM for this assembly. How to manage that? Different CAD systems will require slightly different techniques and OpenBOM provides you with this option (check OpenBOM CAD integrations page for more information about each CAD). Today, we are going to talk about Solidworks.

There are two possible ways to flag an assembly in Solidworks, so OpenBOM will recognize it as “purchased assembly”. In the video below, we demonstrate two possible options:

Option 1: Envelope settings

Option 2: Solidworks Bill of Materials Hide

Each of these options has pros and cons and we will explain which one you can use in each specific situation.

Conclusion 

OpenBOM gives you a flexible way to create BOM with purchased assemblies by marking such an assembly in Solidworks. In such a way, OpenBOM will capture the settings and the result BOM will include the desired purchased assembly as a single item with no sub-items. Option 1 (envelope) is good because you can use it granularly and you don’t need to have access to this assembly (eg. it designed by somebody else). Option 2 is better if you have an access to the assembly if you want it to be set for all instances of the assembly. 

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Best, Oleg.