I am in need of some advice / help with increasing the drafting output at work. I work for a company that supplies / fabricates pipes supports for large industrial facilities. For every pipe support we make, a CAD drawing and BOM is created for the customer and the shop workers to use as a guide. This is not an issue for small orders or orders where most of the supports are identical and have the same BOM. On the other hand, large orders containing unique supports create an extreme amount of drafting work.
The issue I am having right now is with an order that contains over 300 supports. Of the 300 supports, there are only 5 different assembly styles used but the dimensions (rod length / pipe size) are different for all 300. So a drafter has to go through an excel sheet and manually put in the different dimensions for 300 different CAD drawings.
I am wondering and would like some advice on a way to stream line this process. Is there a program available that can link my excel information to AutoCAD and pump out 300 drawing with the excel BOM? I know I can link an excel sheet with an AutoCAD block and my initial thought was to write a c++ program to do that 300 times. I just want to know if anyone has had a similar experience and what they did. Any help/advice/insight would be greatly appreciated.
