Autodesk Inventor

[#1]

Hello Forum:

I need some help.

We're a manufacturing facility, large job shop structure. We make weldments and bolted assemblies with material we purchase as "Mill Length" long pieces. Due to the quantity of work we do in a month, we use structured Bill of Materials to keep physical inventories. Also, since the pieces are usually 3 feet long (approx), and we buy in 20 foot pieces, we don't worry about remainders/optimal cut length in a computer. Thats handled while the shop order is generated.

This Bar, lets say 1" x 8" x 3'-6" will have a part number of B03-10800-500, This will show the B for Bar, 03 feet - 1.0 inches thick, 8.00" inches wide, and .500 remainder of feet. Then, we'll show B20-10800-000 for the 20 foot Mill Length we purchase of the material, with the requirement of 3.5.

We use Item Types 1-4, (below), as a field for all item numbers. This way, 3 and 4 Item Types are shown for Warehouse "pulls". 4's alert purchasing to purchase the piece of material.

1 - Finished Product

2 - Sub Assemblies, Generate Internal Shop Order... Routings

3 - Raw Material

4 - Purchased Parts

Indent    Item Number          Qty      Item Type

0            X-132546               1        [Item Type 1]

.1           B03-10800-500      1        [Item Type 2]

.2           B20-10800-000     3.5      [Item Type 3]

.1           BHH-Z0813-425     2        [Item Type 4]

My question is, how can I import that data into an ERP / MRP system? When done with 2D the Bill of Material is a "dumb" document, and leads to costly errors. Currently we're working with an in-house BOM software, but are likely moving towards Baan or SAP.

If there's another way to look at this, or solutions please reply.

Thanks,

Dan

[#2]

Have you considered using the "New Property" option in the parts list? Creating a new property named "item  type"

It may need some manual entry into that column after creating the parts list, but with inventor parts being easily exported to excel spreadsheet and manipulated from there to suite.

Also with excel and it's spreadsheet there are formula's to create the stock control etc that you need, as well as end billing by use of lookups from one spreadsheet to another or importing the automatically importing data from one spreadsheet to another, but it been a long time since I did any of that myself so I'm very rusty on how.

Any way just a thought