Skip to main content
5-Regular Member
June 1, 2024
Question

Raw Material Stock Size Estimation

  • June 1, 2024
  • 2 replies
  • 1560 views

In our company, creating raw materials lists for projects (like product A) is a time-consuming manual process. Our estimator has to go through every single part in a CAD model from Creo to figure out how much sheet metal, bars, and pipes we'll need. This is especially tedious for our low-volume, high-mix production.

 

Is there a better way?

Ideally, we did like to extract raw material dimensions (highlighted in red in the table below) directly from the Creo 3D model parameters. This seems like a common need for manufacturers – how are you all handling material estimation with Creo and Windchill?

 

Looking to automate this process and free up our estimator's time for more valuable tasks. So far I have tried to fix Height/Diameter/Thickness column through Material Library(mtl file).

 

Any insights or tips would be greatly appreciated!

 

SV_10063132_1-1717229770149.png

 

 

 

2 replies

tbraxton
22-Sapphire II
22-Sapphire II
June 2, 2024

An enhancement has been added in Creo 11. Refer to this link for details. It may help with your issue. It is also possible to get bounding box information using Modelcheck and Creo/Toolkit API.

 

Enhancement: Fast Bounding Box Calculation (ptc.com)

5-Regular Member
June 3, 2024

Thanks for your reply.

 

I was exploring the bounding box feature, but I am not sure if it will be helpful. The bounding box provides length, width, and height, but the last column of the table (diameter/thickness) contains fixed information from the material library. This makes it challenging to match these values with those from the bounding box.

Community Moderator
June 11, 2024

Hello @SV_10063132

 

It looks like you have a response from a community member. If it answer's your question please mark the reply as the Accepted Solution. 

Of course, if you have more to share on your issue, please let the Community know so other community members can continue to help you.

Thanks,
Community Moderation Team.