After finishing a CAD, how do you figure out what parts to order. In the past, the person doing the CAD just ordered the parts as soon as he was done but that was time consuming.
I am using Inventor and the automatically generated BOM isn’t too helpful and only gets worse when you mirror parts(or maybe im doing something wrong. I also tried having people just count all the parts in an assembly and create a BOM but that is prone to human error and I noticed a few mistakes. I had people double check everything but in the end, nobody is perfect. The last thing I want to do is order parts, wait a week, find out we didn’t order everything, and wait another week, before receiving all the parts.
What I’ve been doing on recent projects is sorting parts into folders and coloring them in the assembly based on whether they’re custom machined parts, COTS parts that we have, or COTS parts that need to be ordered (there’s also a subcategory for modified COTS parts). I also group every copy of the same part together in the asm tree, though this might be annoying in some cases.
It’s not super elegant for iterative design, but if you’re the type of person that likes to flesh out everything in CAD before a single part is picked up, it keeps everything organized. When you’re ready to order, just go down the list of parts in the “to be ordered” folder and match the quantity based on the assembly tree.
Color coding in the assembly also serves as a nice indicator if how much manufacturing work you’ll have to do, and incentives a lower amount of custom parts.
Before each season starts, we tear up our storage closets and inventory everything so we know exactly what we have in stock. When we design the CAD, all non-COTS parts get a custom part number to facilitate tracking through production and assembly. Any part with a name that’s not a custom part number is therefore COTS, and goes on the list. That list then gets compared to our inventory list from the beginning of the season, multiplied by two (for practice robot), and split by vendor for ordering. Once the CAD is finalized, the whole process only takes a few hours.
You might want to just keep a spreadsheet and manually update it. It’s more time consuming, but if you do it as you go it’ll only take up a couple minutes here and there, especially as you start reusing COTS parts. Typically I’ll use the following columns:
Part Name/Description
Supplier
Supplier Part Number
Piece Cost
Quantity
Extended Cost (Piece Cost * Quantity)
I like doing this because you can see your total cost as you go and it’s easy to hand off to someone else to make the order if needed.
It’s going to change this year since we expanded our shop and got a few new storage areas. In general, we keep everything either in tubs, tackle boxes, or parts organizers. Some things can be difficult to find, but for the most part it’s not a problem. Knowing what you have makes it easier to find it.
If you’re interested in how to organize your stuff, there are a number of good threads on CD. You can use the search function or google “organize site:chiefdelphi.com” to find them.