Promoting/floating certain consumables and loose items to top level of BOM

[DRoam]

Sometimes there are loose parts or consumables that get used at various levels of an assembly, but always need to be tallied up and listed at the top level BOM. Consumables are one example (glue, paint, etc.). Another example might be an "ID tag" that gets attached to each instance of "Part X" in the field. The total required number of these tags needs to be tallied up and listed at the top-level for a project, but a tag needs to be included for every instance of Part X, at every level. Another example would be bolts and washers that go with every instance of "Part X".

Currently, the closest way to do this that I know of is to make a "package" assembly that contains Part X plus its loose components (ID tag, bolts, or whatever), and set the package assembly as Phantom. Then, place the package assembly wherever Part X goes, rather than Part X by itself. This ensures that the required loose parts are always included (both in the model and the BOM) with every Part X. The same thing could be done for consumables that go with a part or assembly.

However, the result of this approach is that the loose parts/consumables are scattered about various levels of the assembly structure, wherever Part X happens to be. And there's no way to get all the loose parts to float to the top level without making a bunch of assemblies "Phantom" that shouldn't be Phantom.

I haven't been able to find a good solution to this. So, I'm creating this post to hopefully get some answers to the following questions:

1. Do you know of a good way to do what I described above?
2. If not, have you experienced a similar need, and would you benefit from a good solution?
3. If #2 is "yes", do you have any thoughts on how this ideally could work? For example, how would we tell Inventor which parts need to float to the top, and how would we tell Inventor which assembly is the "top" one? Should floated parts be listed in intermediate assembly BOMs as well, or just the top one, or should this be an option?

If you have any answers to the questions above, or other thoughts on this topic, please do share! Thanks in advance for any contributions.

[mcgyvr]

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@DRoam wrote:

 but always need to be tallied up and listed at the top level BOM. Consumables are one example (glue, paint, etc.).

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No way that I know of..

Now my curiosity/.... Why are those treated differently vs every other component in an assembly structure? 

The same process that alerts purchasing to purchase any other level component will ensure that those are also handled I would think..   Maybe you have a "guy who grabs ALL of the consumables" for a job.. But why is he handling differently than any other water spider/shopper or whatever of components.. 

[andrewiv]

We run into this occasionally.  One solution I have developed for hydraulic oil is to put a custom property on all of our hydraulic assemblies that say the oil volume for that particular assembly.  Then I have an iLogic rule that goes through an entire assembly and adds all the oil volume properties to give us a correct quantity on the top level assembly.

[DRoam]

Hi @mcgyvr, good question. You're correct that purchasing doesn't much care about where items are scattered; they get the "Parts Only" list, essentially.

The "Structured" top-level assembly list, on the other hand, is great for packaging and shipping purposes. It lists the correct required quantity of each "top-level" item that needs to be packaged and delivered.

The only issue with that is the "float to top" situation that I've brought up here -- things buried down in subassemblies that should be listed at the top level because they are packaged and delivered on their own. It's due to these things that the top-level Structured BOM isn't always a full and complete "packing and shipping list", and we have to carefully comb through subassemblies to make sure all items like this are accounted for.

[DRoam]

Thanks @andrewiv, that's a great suggestions for consumables. Unfortunately, that doesn't work for actual "solid" things that you may want to be displayed in the model, like bolts. Another thing I'm trying to avoid is the possibility of forgetting to run an iLogic rule and update the total quantity after a design change. But that is a viable suggestion for some circumstances. Thanks again.

[andrewiv]

Is there a reason that you wouldn't just use the parts only BOM to display items like hardware?  If you want to bring just the purchased parts to the top and still have assemblies, then I don't think this can be done without some special programming.

[swalton]

Ahh...

A classic "Engineering-BOM is not what Manufacturing/Purchasing/Shipping wants for their BOMs" issue.

I suspect that Autodesk will treat this as out-of-scope for Inventor.  So maybe a 3rd party tool or external purchasing system can be used to track the "promoted" items. Maybe OpenBOM?  or your company's ERP? or an excel macro that runs on an exported BOM?

Otherwise you may be limited to custom iLogic that runs in your top-level assembly.