From CAD to purchasing 2

[PatCouture]

Hi! We are a small company with 30 employees, including 3 full time cad user (SW) and 8 part time for using a total of 7 floating licenses. We have a custom made system used to purchase everything we need for our projects. Unfortunately we did not invest time yet to develop some kind of bridge between SolidWorks and our custom built purchasing software. I would like to evaluate if it's better for us to go with a full blown ERP system found on the market or if we allocate ressources to improve our actual system.

I'd appreciate to hear what you are using and how do you go from your assemblies in SW to creating purchase order.

So far my main problem is there is too much manual operation required for the creation of items in the purchasing software. If I could I would automate as much as possible the information transfer from the part properties in SW to the purchasing software in order to reuse data instead of filling it twice. I'm sure I'm not the first one having to go through that problem so I wonder how others have solved it.

Thanks in advance for your time.

Patrick

 

[CheckerHater]

Your question is "larger then life", but some basic ideas can be implemented.

First: document what you do. Make sure that everybody is doing things the same way. Make sure you assign part properties for all relevant information.

Second: create custom BOM template that will have all necessary properties arranged nicely.

Third: SolidWorks BOM can be exported to Excel file, do that and you have system-agnostic file that can be passed around to different departments.

This is what you can do right now, before you invest into PDM / ERP system(s) of a sort. There are several possibilities there. I am afraid some amount of manual work may still be involved.

"For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert"
Arthur C. Clarke Profiles of the future

 

[TheTick]

"System agnostic" seems to be the phrase that pays.

If all you need to do is copy data from SW and plant into your system, should be little difficulty. It's just data. Probably harder to make sure everyone populates SW properties like they should.

I imagine there may be some hacking required on the receiving end. But it may be as simple as dumpping the data into a database.

 

[PatCouture]

Yeah I know it's a large topic! I'm would think I can find some sort of beautiful way of exporting a bom from SW that could be taken easily into my purchasing software but I wonder If that would be enough and if I would not be better to spend my energy on something else. At the same time I've never gone through a full implementation of an ERP system so I may have an Idealistic image of what it can do versus the reality.

Thanks

 

[handleman]

The big unknown here is what can your purchasing system import? Using SolidWorks or Excel API, it's not so difficult to create pretty much any file structure you want from the BOM in SolidWorks. At my last job we had a fully custom purchasing software written by a guy who decided he didn't want to fix/improve/update it anymore after about 1997. Inputting data was completely manual and terribly unintuitive and non-user-friendly. I wrote code to read the SW BOM, validate the data, and create dBase files that mimicked the files created by the input process. None of the engineers had to use that crappy system anymore.

 

[PatCouture]

Hi Handleman.

That's the kind of story I'm interested in. I don't know how to code so this tasks seems very difficult to me but if you can tell me a little bit more how you did it, I should be able to find somebody who could write the code for me. For now I don't really know what's possible with SW so I have a hard time figuring out what to ask for.

Patrick

 

[handleman]

The question really isn't about SW capability, it's whether or not your purchasing system has some way to get data into it other than its own interface. Can it import CSV files? Text files? Does it work with a SQL accessible database? Etc... Through VBA SolidWorks can do any of those things.

 

[drawoh]

PatCouture,

Set up your bills of material so that they are the same format as your purchasing system. Once you have done that, there are all sorts of solutions for automating purchasing. Until you do it, there are no solutions.

--
JHG

 

[MikeHalloran]

I would bring a full blown ERP system to a small company only if I were tied to a horse and dragged forty miles by my tongue.

Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[PatCouture]

Thanks all for your input.

I'll will start by listing exactly what I need and what I would like to improve then prioritize and see what I can accomplish and how.

From your suggestions I will make a BOM in SW that format all the important information and see how I can import that into our purchasing software. I'm not sure but I think it's SQL based so if I can't have it imported directly, at worst Excel will be used as middle ground.

 

[fifiririloulou]

In my company we have a purchasing software which is SQL based.
I programmed a few custom applications to send and retrieve information from it.
One of them is to send SolidWorks BOM and weldment cut list, which saved us a great deal of hassle.
You can probably do the same.
The easy part is to collect the data from the drawing.
The hard part is to know where to send it in the SQL database.