Bill of materials designation similar to gathering part but reversed for purchased assemblies

[MarcHendrickson]

We need a designation similar to the gathering part designation that would allow us to designate an assembly as a purchased item so when displayed in the BOM it does not indent below the purchased item even thought there may be structure under that assembly node.

The reason is assemblies change from Make to Buy or Buy to Make all the time depending on plant capacity or capabilities. When suppliers or design partners provide an assembly in native cad it has the assembly part structure under the assembly node that is not required to be displayed when reporting on the top level assembly or when integrating with MES or ERP. If Auto association is used with WTParts and CAD the below structure will indent in Windchill. These sub-assemblies and parts are not required for integration or viewing in the BOM structure and currently there is no way of eliminating them.

[kpritchard]

Maybe the answer is functionality to limit expansion when a Buy or Buy Single Source is encountered.  If it's a Gathering Part type of designation it's going to apply to the Part Master and would need to be modified by Edit Common Attributes.

I'm looking at going the other way... taking Make/Buy out of the Windchill Design View and allowing it to be set in ERP/MES depending on which way thie wind is blowing that week.  That being said, my philosophy is also to restrict modification of Part Attributes (the "what it is") at released (or equivalent) State.  I can't see myself making Windchill changes as a result of shifting operations strategies.

[GregoryPERASSO]

For this use case, we add "Make or Buy" in the Source list. And manage some Alternative Manufacturing view.  to "disconnect" Design from manufacturing process capabilities

For the CAD to BOM part.   for purchased assembly where supplier give us full CAD asm, we choose to create gathering WTparts for all sub levels.  Only the top asm has a "real" WTpart

So in MPMlink, manuf engineers clearly view that these gathering parts can be removed in the Manufacturing view

And you do not necessary have a WTpart for all CADdcoument.  You can control by a preference a CAD parameter for driving if auto associate create a WTPart or not

regards

[kpritchard]

I was assuming in Marc's use case that they needed to switch back and forth.  If you don't need to you can use a different association type such as Contributing Image or Image rather than Owner.  Use this all the time for weldments that are modelled as assemblies, where you do not want to have every member, gusset etc. to have an equivalent WTPart.  Same approach could be applied to externally supplied CAD where you only want a WTPart for the top level.

[MarcHendrickson]

Let me fill in the blanks, we are integrating Windchill E-BOM's with MES and ERP. ERP is the system of ownership of the attribute Source: I agree we dont want to change this attribute based on the wind direction of manufacturing operations. But diuring the early phases of product development prior to systems integration E-BOM reporting with the attribute make or buy can help me direct design build team work direction to either Manufacturing engineering or supply chain. After that when the systems are integrated ERP can be the master of this attribute sync'd daily. All I am asking for is a method, (Not the use of Gathering Parts function but similar) that would either continue the BOM indentation below on all Makes or stop the indentation if designated as Buy. I refered to the Gathering Part fucntion because I want similar functionality but in the opposite direction. We do not have MPM Link nor are we going to purchase it anytime soon.

[MarcHendrickson]

One last thing, when creating or linking CAD to WTParts if this existed it could simplify the auto association process, if an assembly is designated as a Make = create all sub-node elements as WTParts, if Buy = stop the auto association below the purchased part.