Hi guys, I'm a very low AutoCad seat-time user but I'm also a stickler for using best practices and unfortunately seat time and best practices tend to go hand in hand... Currently I'm using Autodesk AutoCad 2024 (couldn't tell you what it is, it doesn't say LTE, I think it's just basic), and I have access to a number of AutoCad products but I expect AutoCad Mechanical may be the right way to move forward...
Anyways the AutoCad templates that we have right now have an annotated BOM and were written by some guy many years ago who is no longer with us and no one has bothered to see if there's a different way to do things. Our workflow utilizes 0 blocks - we copy old drawings (mostly PID), add and remove things manually (including BOM balloons and BOM table items) and having talked to our electrical guys and done a little mechanical research it looks like we're spending a lot of time doing things manually that we may not actually need to do.
So regarding how to get started with this I'm wondering if people feel that there's a lot of benefits to having attributed blocks that sync to the BOM? All of our BOM items increment by 10 instead of one (someone probably did this in the 30's and we rolled with it...), so is it possible to set up the BOM so it does custom increments or will it want to increment by 1? Often a lot of parts get tags associated with them so they can be diagnosed in the field - i.e. handvalve 5, flowmeter 1, etc... and it's something that needs to be tracked, however the tags end up a separate assembly - i.e. the PID diagram is assembly 1234-DD, the tag assembly is 1234-BF. This tag assembly does not actually exist as a drawing, but it's an assembly that we release the tags to in our ERP, so being able to drop a part (or block?) in and have a tag attribute would be really helpful, even more so that attribute can be collected from a separate BOM. Alternatively I write a lot of VB(A, .NET) so iterating through the blocks for a "tag" attribute and kicking out a list wouldn't be the end of the world.
Is there an easy way to make a block of 10 different parts and collect them using a BOM and have the balloon numbers associate with the BOM item? Or will BOM item numbers have to be handled manually if that block is being used on multiple drawings? Or maybe the blocks need to be nested?
Kinda curious how anyone on the forums would start this, as dumb as it sounds there is no one here who can answer these questions as it's all uncharted territory for us
Thanks
