Finally, a quiet hour to put a blog post up. This post will cover how to get a Bill of Materials (BOM) from AutoCAD Plant 3D. It’s is easy, as long as you know where the button is !
In AutoCAD Plant applications, the place to find data is the Data Manager window. In this window you can get data on items modeled in the current drawing or in the whole project. You launch Data Manager from the ribbon Home tab.
The data can be shown grouped and filtered in various ways. Unfortunately, the default setting for how the data is presented is a bit strange – it is grouped by area and then line number. This view may be interesting for some, but mostly I want to see something that looks more like a BOM.
Fortunately, it’s easy to change to the BOM view. First, launch Project Setup, which you find on the Home tab under Project Manager fly-out.
In Project Setup, navigate to the Plant 3D DWG settings – Data Manager Configuration node. Once there, change the Default Data Manager view to be by Object Type.
That’s it! Press the Ok button to close Project Setup and save your changes. Now in the Data Manager window you should see a view that is more like a BOM part listing.
The node that reports back just the pipe and fittings is the node labeled Pipe Run Components. As always, you will want to rearrange some of the columns, sort by clicking on the header row and/or use the hide blank columns button. You also may want to change to Plant 3D Project Data from the dropdown in the upper left so you see all the parts in the project, not just the ones in the current drawing.
From here, you can sort, filter or edit values. As always, you can export the data view to Microsoft Excel then you can use all you MS-Excel skills to format, share and report on the data.
