Hi Folks,
Been off the radar for a while. Looking for a few individuals willing to "beta trial/test" a new Excel (2000 or better) based tool I have developed that creates a multi sheet costed Bill of Material directly from a SW assembly hierarchy. A little rundown on the output. It extracts custom property data (currently limited, but will expand to any list you define) and of course the reporting structure (with quantity) and creates the following in Excel.
Each sheet is named for every sub-assembly in the structure, one master item listing, one assembly index listing, one top assembly sheet, everything is hyperlinked including directly to the drawing and parts so users outside the actual SW environment (purchasing, etc) can use a tool (Excel) they are familiar with and directly access the files without having to know where on the network they are(it uses fully qualified UNC paths, not letter maps as reference). Typically the columns are as follows: Qty, File Name, Description, Creator, Creation Date, Unit Price, Extended Price. Batch printing abilities, linked costing structure, i.e. if you change the price of an item on the master item list it rolls up right to the top assembly. You can override piece part pricing for assembly priced subs. It flags these overrides with colored tabs. It has a Where Used function that hyperlinks to the sub assemblies. You can traverse the assembly in seconds up or down the hierarchy using hyperlinked and search abilities. It also has a SW feature tree like interface that uses icons to denote "types" of parts if you use custom properties to identify them. Such as purchased items vs. fabricated, vs. modified purchased items, etc. This feature allows one to quickly assimilate the hierarchy and then use it to traverse the hierarchy in a flash. It does all this from one button click. I have made a BOM with 176 subassemblies and over 4000 parts, (1100 discrete) in about 20 minutes(hey its not compiled remember).
If your interested in assisting in helping work out the kinks with this, there will be a substantial discount to the final product (like free, keep in mind not everyone can be a beta tester). Also keep in mind that each customers end product will probably require slight tweaking in the underlying code to get it working smoothly. However I believe this one of the attractions to the product. Once you get it, you own the source code too. Meaning if want to tweak it a bit you can!
Thanks.