BOM / INVENTORY PROBLEM

[bscioscia]

Hello,

We are changing our inventory software from Exact Alliance to Mysis.  Unfortunately Mysis does support many of our engineering needs as well as Alliance did.  In the past we used Alliance for our BOM creation so it was directly linked to our inventory.  We have thousands of BOM's in Alliance and probably 50,000 part #'s.  Is inventor capable of importing this data? Are Inventor's BOM capabilities powerful enough to support a large companies needs?  Does anyone know of a way (or software package) that will help us?  I'd rather not manually enter these parts.

Thanks

Brian

[mcgyvr]

Nope. Technically (with the right programs) the way it should work is that Inventor "pushes" the bom into your ERP software.. Not the other way around (pull).  We use Made2Manage as our ERP system and there is a 3rd part program called "cadlink" which allows you to automatically push the bom from Inventor into your ERP system automatically. Cadlink isn't cheap and we somehow couldn't justify the price ($5K +1.5K per year subscription) so I manually enter the boms into Inventor

If your ERP just pushed the data into Inventor how would it know where to constrain parts,etc..

Were you using Inventor before? Frankly I'm wondering what you are trying to do actually. Do you not already have drawings/models for these 50,000 parts/assemblies already? If not do you still make/sell all that.

When we switched to Inventor we already had thousands of Autocad drawings and we decided that we would update/move it to Inventor when we got an order ONLY. There is no point doing the work if you will never sell it again,etc..

[bscioscia]

I'm not concerned with importing drawings.  All of our existing BOM's are structured in our MRP program.  I need to get all of those part #'s into Inventor BOMs.

[terry.gonzales]

I'm with a small company as well that has an old database system that holds all of our part numbers. I'm also looking for a program that can provide an import/export interface within Inventor to and from that data base.

Here is how it should work. We start with a top level assy drawing with a BOM created within Inventor using Parts List. This third party program would look up each item in the BOM and cross reference it with existing part numbers in our database. It would then automatically populate the remaining fields within the BOM, such as part description and drawing numbers. (sometimes our part numbers are not the same as our drawing numbers, it's weird I know)

Using the export function, after the BOM of this new top level assy has been updated using the database, we could then export this BOM to the database under the new top level assy part number.

We had a guy who managed to write a macro to do this using VBA but he's gone and apparently the VBA version isn't supported with Inventor 2012 and above. So, we need a way to do this in Inventor 2012 and above.

Anyone know of a program or a good programer who can do this?

[Curtis_Waguespack]

Hi terry.gonzales,

If you post your VBA code on the customization forum, you might find someone who can take a look and udpate it:

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Autodesk-Inventor-Customization/bd-p/120

You might also post some sample files, and a few more details on the database.

I hope this helps.
Best of luck to you in all of your Inventor pursuits,
Curtis
http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com

[terry.gonzales]

Thanks, our database is MySQL. Our IT guys say this is a fairly easy database to read/write to. I know a new ERP system would be nice and offer better import/export to and from Inventor/Autocad but we have too many downstream programs tied to the current MySQL database. Changing to a new ERP system write now isn't practical.

I'll do some digging and see if I can find the VBA code and post it in the customization forum. Thanks for the advice.