Best way forward

Hi all

I'd appreciate some advice please.

Our company manufactures modular buildings (residential, offices, ablutions, hospitals, classrooms etc) and we are looking to streamline our procedures as far as quantifying our units is concerned.

Until now we have been generating material takeoffs for each unit using a combination of a Data Extraction and manual input, but we are really only producing a list of the larger items (Windows, doors, furniture, electrical and plumbing fittings etc)

We are wanting to make this more specific now as we want materials for each unit to be pulled from our Stores using a comprehensive BOM including every single item from windpiping to trims to screws and rivets.

We have a fairly extensive library of Blocks, most of which are dynamic. But for example instead of a simple block for a window we are now wanting the material list to include for 2 different rivet sizes, the rubber inseal as well as a clip on set. So instead of 1 item we now need 5 different items listed.

My question is this, what is the most sensible way of doing this?

From what I can tell we have 3 options

A) Continue to Extract Data but modify our blocks to be far more comprehensive in their make up.

B) Make use of the BOM function in Mechanical using Part References

C) Start using Inventor for all our drawing work. I am not familiar with Inventor but I am told it could be used to accomplish what we want. This obviously requires a complete overhaul of the drawing office but if it's going to be worthwhile in the long run the bosses are happy to do it. We do have Inventor suite so outlaying for the software is not an issue.

Any guidance from those who have experience in this kind of set up would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Rob

I would use option B or C, C being better IMHO, since the bosses are willing to put forth the investment.

Thanks SLW.

Upon further discussion we have decided to put the Inventor switch on hold for now. We are moving our production line to a larger facility in the next 6 months so we do not have much time to get ourselves skilled up to a level where we would be able to accomplish what we want via Inventor.

What we have decided to do for now is Option D, using Microsoft Excel to output a complete BOM based on some manual input. Indications are that it will work quite well in the interim as you can obviously automate quite a bit, however we are aware that we cannot avoid moving to Inventor for too long.