When it comes to a manufacturing or assembly Bill of Materials (BOM), some components such as adhesives or packaging are important to include, but may be difficult or burdensome to design. With the most recent Onshape update, you can now use the Items functionality to add parts to your BOM without having to model them. Let’s take a look at how to implement and use items for your company.
As an Onshape Professional or Enterprise administrator, you can see “Items” listed under the company settings.
From here, you can create a new item that your Company or Enterprise users can add to the BOM.
While filling out the metadata for an item, notice that the metadata is being pulled from your Company Properties. Items are a new object type that properties can be applied to. Any custom properties created that apply to all object types will already be applied to items. You may need to go back to a specific property and make sure that its scope applies to items in order to use it.
One important property is “Unit of measure.” This allows you to specify the units to define your item. For example, if you are adding paint as an item, you may want to specify the volume of paint needed in fluid ounces.
Items can be categorized with the Category property. If you want to add categories to the dropdown list, go back to the Company Properties and add them there.
After setting the item to active and clicking “Create,” it can be added to any BOM by any user. When adding an item in the BOM, you can choose to reference the item to a part in the assembly. The item will appear as a new row of the BOM and you will see it appear in the assembly instance list.
Interested in learning more Onshape Tech Tips? You can review the most recent technical blogs here.