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Weight rollup in Windchill 10.1 M040

rkayasth
6-Contributor

Weight rollup in Windchill 10.1 M040

Hello Gurus',

I have the weight attribute getting populated from Pro/e for each of the wtparts.

Is there a way to automatically add up (rollup) the weight all the way to the root product / end-item?

Thanks,

Ravin Kayasth

9 REPLIES 9
GregoryPERASSO
14-Alexandrite
(To:rkayasth)

Hello

We have exactly this kind of need. But the "dynamic" nature of the BOMs in Windchill (ConfigSpec, effectivities, xBOMs) make this need difficult to handle ...

For me the best way, is to build a Cognos report that will summarize weights, or a dynamic calculated attributes ... based on part structure and a configspec ...

because the result will depend if you want the weight of the latest Released EndItem BOM, a particular baseline or lot number ... or the latest work in progress one ....

Difficult to persist this kind of information , as You don't want necessary modifiy or iterate each End items when you change a component in the sub/sub level of the structure ....

regards

Gregory is correct with the dynamics and complexity. That's the reason why we adress this with our module WPA.

http://www.ptc.com/product/windchill/product-analytics

Weight is not fully OOTB right now, but we do the BOM rollup for Cost. There is the option to have custom logic which will do the same for weight.

What is your business use case behind this requirement? Is your customer designing huge machines or plant pieces which he needs to transport later on? Design to cost and weight has a great potential to shorten design cycles since you do it right at the first shot and you can directly identify the parts with biggest impact.

The "problem" with weight, is also that it deals with "material" ....

And today, the material data model in Windchill is not homogeneous .... between CAE/CAD integration,BOM management, WPA, REACH & ROHS databases ,Flex for retail ... etc ....

can have a look to this idea and vote

Having a single "Material" Business Object in Windchill

I have achieved this thru customization.

To answer your questions, the material and the mass (which is considered weight by customer) are transferred from Creo and CATIA thru attribute mapping.

And then we have a custom tab where the custom code takes over reading the product structure and the value transferred and rollup code rolls up the value at sub-assembly and at the parent assembly levels and ultimately at the product level.

mschulze
13-Aquamarine
(To:OliverDroop)

Hello Oliver, just for clarification, to calculate the WEIGHT of a WTPart structure,

* we need the Product-Analytics Cost module?

* The license free installation of Product Analytics is not sufficent?

* The requestet function for WEIGHT calculation can then be configured and must not be implemented by a customization?

* Can the calculated WEIGHT value be automatically written back to the WTPart?

This is deceptively tricky, especially if you want to roll up mass for all mid level assemblies.

Mass is of course dependent on the configuration hence the configuration specification has to be considered.

The config is calculated top down.

The mass has to be calculated bottom up.

This means the complete structure has to be generated before you can even start to generate the rolled up masses.

When mass is supplied from CAD, the dependencies of each model can have an influence on the model and its mass.

It is possible for the mass of a component model to become out of date, if dependencies change, without then regenerating the used by models. We just have to trust CAD designers will do this.


In addition to the usage quantities of components you also have to consider the quantities of all upward assemblies, taking the mathematical product of those values.

Then of course your CAD config may be different to your part config. So you have to pass mass from CAD documents to Windchill parts, put only to Windchill Part components not Windchill Part assemblies, regardless of whether the part is described by a CAD component or CAD Assembly. Then repeat the mass roll up calculation for part configuration.


We report our configurations then calculate the mass roll up outside of Windchill.

My use case is probably unique and not proven out yet...but a concept I'm working on that involves Creo View bill of material functionality.  Creo View can export a BOM of the ".prt" CAD type files only...this might eliminate the need to worry about assemblies.  The image shows a WTPart structure assembly...Creo View can output any attribute from Parametric, Windchill or WTPart (Part_Weight) and (Part_measuredweight) as highlighted.    The nice benefit about Creo View is that we can load the file at any time and with positioning assembly structure it loads the latest version of the lower level components  Creo View Bill of Material only outputs the files that are loaded...most of the structure below is not loaded.  So theoretically in my case, an engineer in Europe can update the weight of the CAD engine block and I can open the top level truck assembly from North America in Creo View and automatically get the change very quickly after he checks it in. You will notice in the image below that there are multiple m22 assemlbies...this is what we call an overloaded assembly as it represents multiple options.

We are in the beginning stages of looking at the Creo View process along with WC capability...so this thread will be of great interest to follow!

Capture.JPG

mschulze
13-Aquamarine
(To:BillRyan)

This is an interesting approche, but requires CreoView MCAD.

Can you write back the values to the object attributes?

So they can later on be used in / transfered to an ERP system?

BillRyan
15-Moonstone
(To:mschulze)

Creo View can not be used to modify values of attributes in WC as far as I know.  It can help you quickly identify the ones that do need modified!

I wouldn't rule out an integration between ERP into Creo View...I'm sure somebody is thinking about it!

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