Looking for a Inventory/BOM/Ordering Program like Solidworks Counterpart for Inventor

[bl1droid]

We have been fighting ordering and tracking ordered parts for years.  We still do everything manually.. bom.. export to excel.. order from excel sheets.. update excel sheets.. tracking past orders and current orders is all manual and a pain.  Talked to a company similar to ours the other day and they run solidworks and have implemented the counterpart program (https://www.solidworks.com/partner-product/counterpart) and say it has been a game changer for them.  Do we Inventor guys have anything comparable?  Don't want to change to SW.. been an Inventor guy since inventor was a new program demo...

thanks,

Brian

[A.Acheson]

You really should look at the third party MRP/inventory software route and ensure that suits your business model, easier said than done.

They generally aren’t made by CAD companies but there is many developers that make good add-ins to connect the inventory software to the cad software. These can range in cost and complexity but if the right one is chosen can really improve the headaches. Ideally one that can be tied to the inventor bom export so no manual entry. 

I would also post this on the inventor main forum also as this topic will get a lot of traffic. If you can indicate what you manufacture with a simple example and how say one part is tracked from sales quote through BOM/ purchases order to sales invoice and where it leaves the manufacturing department to the accounts . Where in the world are you based? Having local support, training and customization is a must for this set up so this would be a factor too. 

A shout out to Excel it is a fantastic tool and great for starting out, but can be too flexible and more costly in the long run trying to keep modifying and building in intelligence. 

[bl1droid]

Hey Alan,

thanks for the info.  Ill add to my post.  We design and build custom machinery here.  We really don't inventory any parts per se.. but we do sell repeat tooling a lot for certain machines.  I have been doing this the same for 25 years.. our process is this.. we quote a custom piece of machinery.. machinery is designed on inventor.. reviewed with customer.. on approval we export a bom out for the entire machine in excel format.. we take that bom and break it into two versions.. one is manufactured parts only for the shop which we make prints from and one that is for ordered components.  We take the ordered components one and clean it up and send it up front for our office manager to order parts from.. they input price, date ordered and expected delivery dates in... then as parts arrive, we have a received column that gets marked by our UPS guy saying that it was received.  Here are the problems we fight with...  assembly goes to put the machine together and realizes they are missing a purchased part of parts.. this may be 6-8 weeks after the parts were ordered.. assembly now is stuck and you go back up front to have the secretary call and check on the parts that aren't here that were a 2 week delivery.  Our machine is now due in two weeks and we are just now finding out we are missing parts.. and we get told someone didn't send order in or whatever the reason and it will be 2 weeks to get them.  If we could have found that these parts were late after the first two weeks then we could have had time to get this fixed and in but we have no way to track ordered parts and get flagged when they are late other than somebody with a pile of papers going through multiple orders and trying to check on everything.. it is tough.  The other major problem is items we have ordered in the past.. we get a quote on an item.. we look at the price and think this is crazy high.. what did we pay for it last and you know we have bought it multiple times but we begin searching through 100's of old bom's trying to find that item and where we bought it.. we should be able to type a part number in and see a history report on when we bought it last and what we paid.  This was a ton of info and there is more to it than this but hopefully this will help with what we are looking for.

thanks,

Brian