Feature Friday: You Dropped a BOM on me, PLM 360

Did you know that in addition to importing item details into a workspace you can also import Bill of Material information as well? 

There are 2 ways to perform a Bill of Material (BOM) import.  A single pass that creates the items then the BOM relationships or you can do it in two passes – first create the items using the Item Details import and then connecting them up using the Parent Child BOM Import type (if the items already exist, you just need to do the latter).

We’ll walk through a quick example of how to create structure  In this case, we’ll assume the parts all exist in our workspace and our spreadsheet denotes the parent/child relationship as well as BOM specific information such as Quantity and Reference Designators.

Once you’ve set up your import project for type ‘Parent Child BOM’, it’s important to map the fields in the spreadsheet to the fields in PLM 360.  First order of business is to select a field for the parent item and define it as ‘Match as BOM parent’:

Once that’s done, we identify the Child by selecting ‘Match as BOM Child (Number)’.

Set the import settings at the bottom (here you can see if we were doing this in one pass, we’d have ‘For new records’ set to ‘Add to the Workspace’). 

After running – check it out!

Something to note, this applies to the working revision of the items.

Learn more on the Wiki – see the Import Bills of Materials page or join us for a PLM Talk Wednesday, October 10 all about importing. ^MS

Photo: A.Strakey

The Gap Band: You Dropped A Bomb On Me (and you’re welcome for having it stuck in your head now)

Comments

[Brian Schanen]

Scott:

I checked with a few Vault experts and the prevailing thought is as you pointed out - you'd need to add the parent column into the spreadsheet manually to get it configured to do a Parent/Child import in PLM 360.

Thanks for added a request to the Idea Exchange to expand the PLM Sync tool.

Michelle

[ScottMoyse]

Michelle,

I thought I should repost my twitter question here for the benefit of others reading this post in the future:

Do you have a quick way to create a Parent-Child BOM spreadsheet from Non Released Vault Items?

My method as it stands requires me to create my own parent column in excel & propagate it manually. Since there's no 'Parent' property in the Vault Item Master.

Cheers

Scott