A Bill of Materials is a comprehensive list of parts, items and assemblies – each item should be identified with its item/part number, length, weight, materials and quantities, plus any special considerations such as surface treatment, corrosion protection etc… All this to be done to conform with the General Arrangement and Detail + Assembly Drawings. In addition, they should reflect the Construction Phase and the latest drawing Revisions.

Bills of Material should also include bolt lists including, nuts, bolts, and washers – providing their diameters, lengths and applicable specifications.

It’s a lot of information and a lot of work to maintain and keep up-to-date, but they are key documents used for estimating and purchasing, so any discrepancies between the Bills and the detail documents could prove problematic.

Fortunately, for the detailer using modern CAD technology. all this is taken care of automatically, behind the scenes. We’ll look at how Parabuild handles Bills of Material.

Generating Bills of Material in Parabuild

You can access the Bills of Material function from the Sheets Manager. Before generating the Bills, you should review and/or modify the Settings. These Settings can be set as the default for the entire project – meaning you will only need to do it once.

by clicking on the Generate button and selecting Generate Bills you will be presented with the option to lock the revision using the Revision Manager or to continue without locking.

Select the objects to be included in the Bills which include: Plates, Members and Assemblies. You can filter the objects to be included by selecting specific structural types - this is useful if specific items are to be delegated to a specialist supplier. You also have the option to target a specific Selection, Phase, or Revision. Press OK and all bills of material that are listed in the Sheets Manager will be generated in the selected format (See Settings > Formatting Options). The files will be stored in the same folder as the 3D DWG file.

When you Right-Click on a BOM Item from within the Sheets Manager, you can perform a number of additional options.

It's possible to cut the required profile lengths from the available stock in order to achieve maximum cost efficiency and reduce waste by activating the Profile Length Optimization function.

There is another option for generating Bills of Material in Parabuild and that is by accessing the function from the Toolbar. The result is very much the same as the former, but without the Settings option – these must still be set from the Sheets Manager.

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