Export BOM from Inventor Assembly

The COOLORANGE Labs on GitHub comprises of various sample jobs, events and workflows which are ultimately built to help you spend less to no time on non-productive manual activities and simultaneously enhance the quality of your work. We realized that one of the most prominent issues that CAD/Vault users face is while exporting a BOM from Inventor which is to be consumed by the ERP system.

The conventional way of doing this would be to have the assembly checked out of vault first and then loaded into Inventor. Then the following steps will help to generate an xml file with the BOM data:

1. Assemble > Manage > Bill of Materials.
2. Use File Type drop down to select format and give a name
3. Finally, click on export

Considering assemblies of enormous size, the amount of time spent just to load it into Inventor alone would be extensive and tiring. Keeping this in mind, with the use of PowerShell scripts our experts at coolOrange created an automated workflow to reduce the manual work involved and increase efficient outputs.

Using our workflow, the entire process will now be automated to make your life easier and save precious time. Just install it and every time you release an assembly, a CSV file for the BOM assembly gets automatically created and shared to a custom folder.

Through powerJobs, this workflow carries out a security check to ensure whether the Structured BOM for the assembly is enabled in Inventor prior to release. If the Structured BOM is disabled, the assembly cannot be released. A job is then automatically triggered and executed by powerJobs Processor. It extracts the Structured BOM data from the vaulted assembly, creates a CSV file with this information and saves the file to a shared network folder so that it can be consumed by your ERP system or any other relevant software.

To get started, all you need to do is to go over to the coolOrange Labs on GitHub and download the coolOrange workflow installer, which comes with a set of pre-configured workflows. After extracting the workflow-installer, launch the tool and select the workflow Export BOM from Inventor Assembly, which will automatically get integrated into powerJobs. Once the job for the workflow to export the BOM from Vault is configured through the powerJobs Settings Dialog, from then on it automatically generates the respective BOM file and transfers it to a folder of your choice.

We also offer an amazing solution to automate the transfer of this CSV file to your ERP system directly, thereby eliminating the manual work and reducing errors to almost zero. With the use of our unique world-class software powerGate, this can be accomplished by creating a connection between your Vault and the ERP system.

Check out our other sample-workflows at coolOrange Labs GitHub site.

NOTE: Sample Workflows created by COOLORANGE are also flexible to customize according to requirements through PowerShell scripts. If you require any assistance, please drop us an email.