It’s a warm summer afternoon. The design office is buzzing with activity, but not the good kind.
Four engineers are hunched over spreadsheets, juggling columns, copy-pasting part numbers, and cross-checking Excel files against ERP entries.
Inside? Your BOM process is sweating bullets.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone.
Many engineering teams are still spending hours manually transferring Bills of Materials (BOMs) from Autodesk Vault to their ERP system — a process that feels more like archaeology than automation.
In one real-world case we recently looked at, a company was processing around 160 BOMs every month — across two engineering divisions.
Sounds manageable, right?
Well, not when each BOM takes between 1.5 and 3 hours to handle manually.
That adds up fast: over 1,700 engineering hours every single month lost to non-value-added work.
Worse yet, the process wasn’t just slow.
It was risky.
When BOMs are exported, manipulated in Excel, and reimported into ERP manually, mistakes creep in:
You might not feel the burn with each individual BOM. But look at the end-of-year report, and suddenly you're asking: Where did all our engineering time go?
Enter powerGate — our Vault-to-ERP integration platform.
With automation in place, what used to take engineers 90 to 180 minutes, now takes just 3 to 10 minutes total.
Even accounting for edge cases and occasional manual review, the company conservatively estimated an 85% time reduction — freeing up over €375,000 in engineering time per year.
That’s not just cost saving — it’s a strategic capacity boost.
Let’s put it in perspective.
1,700 hours/month isn’t just a spreadsheet stat.
It’s:
It’s also… more time to take a breath, step outside, and not fear another Excel disaster lurking in the workflow.
What about the cost?
With a moderate initial investment and a recurring licensing cost of under €12,000/year, the ROI was
And this isn’t unusual.
In our experience, similar organizations see comparable gains as soon as they ditch the manual process and let automation take over.
If your engineers are still pasting BOMs by hand, it’s time to stop.
They deserve tools that match their talent.
Your company deserves accuracy, speed, and clarity.
And you?
You deserve to leave work without worrying if the wrong washer got ordered again.
So, take a page from this summer lecture:
Automate smart. Work better. Free up time. And maybe — just maybe — make it to the beach before sunset.
Discover how one company reclaimed 1,700 engineering hours a month by automating BOM transfers from Autodesk Vault to ERP. Less Excel. More beach time. Learn how powerGate makes it possible — and book your 15-minute demo today.