SOLIDWORKS EPDM allows you to view Bill of Materials (BOM) directly in the interface without installing a native CAD utility. Let’s take a look at the EPDM interface and how you can configure your BOM views.
First, choose an item in the EPDM interface with a BOM associated with it. In this example, I have selected a SOLIDWORKS assembly. There’s a tab in the bottom half of the interface labeled Bill of Materials. Select it to see the BOM.
The red box below shows the BOM as it appears in EPDM. All the columns are configured in the administration tool to display any bit of metadata in the system. This data can come from the file or entered into the data card of the file.
As the assembly matures, it will travel through the workflow cycle and change revisions. You will have several iterations (or versions) between these revisional milestones.
Changes to the assembly are available for viewing. Simply select a version in the pull down to make it visible.
There is a compare tool (highlighted in the red box below) that allows you to pick a version of the assembly and compare it to another version.
Here we are comparing C to A. The BOM changes colors to highlight the differences: green is for something new, yellow for changes and red for deleted items.
If an item is in yellow (changed), the previous value will appear in brackets for quick visual comparison.
There is also a quick button to export a BOM into a CSV file that opens natively in Microsoft Excel.
The BOM tree structure is also visible for further interrogation of the tree. Parsing down the tree will show you the items in that specific sub-assemblies tree.
The BOM is also visible in alternate formats. Here you can see the BOM with or without its sub-assemblies. In this flat view, we can make only the parts visible, view it indented or just see top-level components.
With this selection, we can see the BOM exactly as it appears in the CAD file. In this example, I have selected a SOLIDWORKS drawing. This drawing has a BOM on it in the CAD file. Its column display and item numbers are visible here.
In the EPDM administration tool, we can configure the BOM display in the user interface. We can make any metadata display in a column for a more extensive or abbreviated BOM.
The database variable that stores the metadata may be shown differently in the column header for easier understanding. To the right, we can also make this BOM view custom to particular users or groups depending on their needs.
Learn how to export PDM Professional Bill of Materials (BOM) items to “dumb” data formats such as standard table formatted XML, CSV and Tab Delimited Text (TXT) documents or directly into a SQL data table by downloading our whitepaper, Connecting PDM to Other Systems.
