Assembly-BOM with one sheet per Subassembly (=stacked single level BOMs)

[Andy_Admin]

Is it possible to get a BOM from an "Part"-assembly that has multiple subassembly-levels and Parts, where each subassembly is on a separate (pdf-)sheet/page from Windchill without customizing? Example below. (Windchill 12.0.2.5)

Expressed differently: I want stacked single level BOMs in one document. Can't be that hard, right? It's 2023, we have AI, a professional PDM-system and that problem is older than anyone here. There must be somebody that had the same problem.

So, second question, because I think Windchill is not capable of doing so. How did you do your customizing to get such a BOM? Please explain for beginner-admins.

Example: Similar like this, plus some more attributes:

Page 1:

Title: Main Assembly, number 1235, attribute 1, attribute 2, attribute 3,...

pos 1: subass 1, number 2345, attribute 1, attribute 2, attribute 3,...

pos 2: subass 2, number 1234, attribute 1, attribute 2, attribute 3,...

pos 3: part 1, number 9335, attribute 1, attribute 2, attribute 3,...

Page 2:

Title: Subass 1, number 2345, attribute 1, attribute 2, attribute 3,...

pos 1: subass 3, number 9999, attribute 1, attribute 2, attribute 3,...

pos 2: part 2, number 5555, attribute 1, attribute 2, attribute 3,...

Page 3

Title: Subass 2, number 1234, attribute 1, attribute 2, attribute 3,...

pos 1: part 3, number 3333, attribute 1, attribute 2, attribute 3,...

pos 2: part 4, number 8888, attribute 1, attribute 2, attribute 3,...

Page 4

Title: Subass 3, number 9999, attribute 1, attribute 2, attribute 3,...

pos 1: part 5, number 8484, attribute 1, attribute 2, attribute 3,...

pos 2: part 6, number 9922, attribute 1, attribute 2, attribute 3,...

(Background: We have a customization that prints all the drawings from the assembly at once, so we want to print the assemblies all at once as well.)

Thanks!

[avillanueva]

If your goal is to avoid customization, then you would need to pursue the consumption of the multi-level BOM report output into something that can format the BOMs as you described.  If you get your table view to include your attributes you need, the table can be exported to a number of formats (XML or XLSX). From there, you can write a macro to find and format each BOM level to be PDFs. If you want a 1 click solution, customization is the only way to go. 

[Andy_Admin]

Thanks for the reply.

Nobody in my company wants to first choose the correct view, export it as an Excel, to then work with a macro to get the pdf. These are too many steps. 

I still can't believe that Windchill can't solve such a simple requirement. Seems customization is the key. (In case nobody else knows better.)

[avillanueva]

Agreed but its not as simple as it sounds. We customized our system to make a printable single level report with a header and related docs. Each site is different and I can see any solution working for one but not for all. The closes I can see to your requirement is CS11 in SAP which is a a BOM level by level but its not anywhere close to printable. In fact the biggest challenge in Windchill UI is that you can print screens. All you get is the view window shown. You have to export to see entire table of data.  

If you choose not to customize, I would look to why you need to print (PDF) in the first place. Are we serving humans or machines? Could the people we are creating this for go to the source or use navigate? 

[Andy_Admin]

Thanks again.

Just one more comment, as nobody seems to have a solution here:

We need to send pdf-documents do external suppliers. These are sometimes small companies with limited capacities and not "industry 4.0-ready". So, yes, they need a PDF, as this is the standard of an "unchangeable" document.

Same with the drawings, but we have a customization there to print/pdf/pdf-and-zip all at once there.