Auto BOM Table

[cying]

Are there any companies out there still using the letter items in their BOM tables? If so, what's the benefits over the number scheme? And how are you using the auto BOM balloons in the callout? I am able to use the relation to show the letters and omitting the "G, I, O, Q, U, V, and Z" letters in the BOM table but the balloons are still showing the numbering scheme. I am trying to change the scheme to numbering scheme, but this may take more convincing and arm twisting. For now, I may need to support the lettering scheme with the auto BOM balloons.

Thank you in advance for your input 🙂

Calvin Ying

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[mlocascio]

Go for the numbers. I have never seen any BOM that used letters - unless it
was a weldment.

[cying]

For most of the "old timers" that has done any work for the government, that was the standard back then. We're also talking about manual drafting so it's no big deal then. Unfortunately this is still being adopted here at my company, but I am still trying to convince the folks to change as I see no benefits using letter schemes. However, I still need to support the near term need of using the letters in the balloon callouts. There has to be an easy method to convert the numbers to letters since this was achievable in the BOM table.


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[mlocascio]

Change is good!



I have worked for the government on a few jobs and I don't remember ever
having to use any letters for our BOM callouts. STRANGE!



Michael P. Locascio

[dgschaefer]

Every time you get a request for an assy drawing, tell them "If I can use a numbered BOM, I can get it to you this afternoon. If needs to be lettered, it'll be sometime next week." I'm betting they'll start choosing numbers. 😄

Seriously, educate folks how Creo is set up to automatically number BOM balloons, but creating letters is much more challenging. Once they understand the cost of their preference, preferences sometimes change.

A looong time ago, I faced the same dilemma and someone on the exploder wrote some crazy cool repeat region relations for me to do just that. I've attached them here. As I said, these are ancient (these attached files are dated November 2000) and I haven't touched them for at least a decade. They may still work, they may not.

There were some limitations, which I can no longer remember clearly. Something about Proe maintaining two different values for the rpt.idx value that messed things up in certain circumstances. For me, we had been manually generating our BOMs. Once I explained that using repeat regions would be easier and more accurate, but would require going from letters to numbers, there was no problem and we abandoned it.

Good luck, hope it helps you.

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