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Last post we reviewed the new process of assigning item to a file in 2015, but as in past releases users don't have to necessarily assign items to CAD files in order to populate our Item Master and ultimately build Bills of Materials (BOM). In fact there's a number of manufacturing workflows that require a less "CAD centric" approach to item creation, so we need to be able to create new items in the item master independently of the CAD BOM.
The process of creating a new item directly in the item master remains fundamentally unchanged, we are still able to select create "New Item" and once one of these items is created attach files to it, add item properties or simply add it to a manufacturing BOM somewhere. What we have traditionally not been able to do though is create items right inside the Bill of Material context.
As part of the 2015 usability enhancements BOM administrators can now, working directly in the BOM tab of an open item, without having to leave this environment to create a new item to insert, simply add an item BOM row. That's it. Select the parent item in the BOM tab and add a row "From New Item".
This method creates the row using the default item numbering scheme, which can be edited to reflect manual settings for things like quantity or position number and as we have added support to edit nested items in the BOM tab, the user can build multiple rows of any structure and on save generate the new items. Once created of course users are able to return to these items individually to attach or assign files and add additional properties when they need to.
This is a huge time saver in terms of the effort of constructing a BOM piece by piece, creating each item in isolation and adding them to the BOM manually or adopting other methods such as creating a BOM in an external tool like Excel and importing it back into Vault to generate Items and BOM structure without a CAD model.
Based on your feedback we have implemented this great shortcut to build basic items and one more method to create new items as copies of existing items – a method we are going to take a look at next.
-Allan
