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Bills of Material from Cable Assemblies

avillanueva
22-Sapphire I

Bills of Material from Cable Assemblies

Has anyone worked on getting Creo to output a proper BOM from a cable assembly?  Right now, you get connectors and the harness parts but what about a listing of the wire from the spools?  I think what it should do is list wires from the spools with their lengths along with connectors as each.  Otherwise, there is no point to showing a Part for the harness model. It should be blocked from the Windchill BOM and manually replaced.  I am on Creo 2 so if this is a change with Creo 4, let me know.

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

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Ha, my old post. Well, I can tell you we've been doing this but not its not integrated. Cabling is an area where alignment between CAD and BOM just does not line up.  Its complicated by a few factors. 

  • Our internal best practice of cabling works to make life easier for the engineering doing routing. BOMs are secondary thought.
  • Often, cables are not unique. There may be multiple instances of a cable which from a BOM perspective are the same cable with just a different routing path. This leads to multiple CAD assemblies which are basically the same Part.
  • In these cases, we've used Image links and not let CAD drive the BOM. What's the point.
  • Top level assembly might have all cabling in a master model assembly to make it easier to work on all cable. They are not assembled at each level they might appear on the BOM structure. We have opted to denote where they actually tree up in the BOM with kit BOMs. This might comprise a few cables together and a simple drawing showing some notes and instructions of how to assemble. Again, loosely tied back to CAD.

No, this has not changed in Creo 4 or 7. 

Last recommendation, lengths are great and I appreciate when they provide accurate information but consider your manufacturing process. If you are not producing hundreds of units, in our case its just a handful of units, exactly quantities on BOMS might be too much. As needed might work just fine. If its a very complicated system (like a space payload), get an accountant on your cabling team and don't forget about mass properties.

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5 REPLIES 5
DavidBrand
14-Alexandrite
(To:avillanueva)

Did you get an answer to this question?

2022 and people are still searching and finding never answered thread on this I suppose. I'm currently searching to figure out how to do WTPart structure for creo cables with Creo 7 and windchill 11.1... same issues... structure for the parts and connectors but not spools

Ha, my old post. Well, I can tell you we've been doing this but not its not integrated. Cabling is an area where alignment between CAD and BOM just does not line up.  Its complicated by a few factors. 

  • Our internal best practice of cabling works to make life easier for the engineering doing routing. BOMs are secondary thought.
  • Often, cables are not unique. There may be multiple instances of a cable which from a BOM perspective are the same cable with just a different routing path. This leads to multiple CAD assemblies which are basically the same Part.
  • In these cases, we've used Image links and not let CAD drive the BOM. What's the point.
  • Top level assembly might have all cabling in a master model assembly to make it easier to work on all cable. They are not assembled at each level they might appear on the BOM structure. We have opted to denote where they actually tree up in the BOM with kit BOMs. This might comprise a few cables together and a simple drawing showing some notes and instructions of how to assemble. Again, loosely tied back to CAD.

No, this has not changed in Creo 4 or 7. 

Last recommendation, lengths are great and I appreciate when they provide accurate information but consider your manufacturing process. If you are not producing hundreds of units, in our case its just a handful of units, exactly quantities on BOMS might be too much. As needed might work just fine. If its a very complicated system (like a space payload), get an accountant on your cabling team and don't forget about mass properties.

Thanks for your reply!

 

Coincidently we are following the exact same process using a copy of an assembly to show different routing rater than a family table instances... I tried that but it got messing have different routing parts to manage. We use the Owner linked harness as a drawing view so that Thingworx navigate drawing viewer works correctly and image link all the copies of other routings options. Our manufacturing assembly is also on the drawing to show it flat and to drive the drawing BOM tables.

 

This method is all fine and well for a purchased harness where we don't need to push a WTPart BOM to ERP but for harnesses we manufacture in house we are doing manual EBOM maintenance on individual wires and build those into "kits" in CAD. If Windchill would allow spools to be associated to a WTPart with the correct qty in feet in that context of the where used assembly this would be solved completely and I suspect is the solution you were seeking 5 years ago.

 

I've gone as far as to ask our harness manufacture how they manage this as they also use Creo Schematics and Cabling They have done some in house programing to extract drawing BOMs to a costing tool but that doesn't really solve my problems as we are pushing WTPart structure with PLM to ERP thru change management. I suppose I could do some work around but we have enough complexity with multi-cad data management and different processing systems based on the object type under changes. Windchill is great for static CAD but we are struggling to implement solutions in Windchill for software and supporting documents that our ERP systems can only treat as a BOM item in our end product.

CadActive Technologies has some off-the-shelf automation to deal with this (persistent) issue. 

 

Reach out to me if you're curious. 

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