CAD Forum

Hello;

Say you have a bracket; it has 5 configurations. I want to find out the total quantity of this bracket used in a large project.

I decided to use PDM "Bill of Materials"; changed to "Parts Only" and export to .CSV and search for the file/part number in excel.
The CSV file will return 5 separate line items matching the 5 different configs. At his point I can add the quantities associated with each config in excel and be done. But is there a settings or something for PDM to treat them as one line item? In other words my export file shows one line item for all different configurations which means the quantity column shows the total used.

Note: I have PDM 2020.

Look at the "Part Configuration Grouping" in the BOM properties.

https://help.solidworks.com/2023/englis ... Redirect=1

Thanks @SPerman. Actually I already thought about that; but I wasn't sure how I can take advantage of that through PDM?

I don't want to open the top level assembly in SW & create a BOM file with that settings (going to be very time consuming); was hoping to quickly get it through PDM.

To my knowledge, this can't be done with a PDM computed BOM. If you add a column for the file name in your BOM, when you export it to excel you can use the Consolidate function in Excel to quickly combine the rows that have the same file name and total up the quantities.

A PDM add-in could also handle this task.

Hi @JSculley That works, thanks!

Seems like I can still use PDM generated CSV file (since the picture attached is how the output looks like for a sample assembly that has a part with two configurations) and then use the consolidate function there.

Normally this wouldn't have been a big deal as I could just add the qty manually or sum function. But I have different parts with different configurations and that's why this is going to be a huge time saver.