Nemuno Banga, a Lithuania-based manufacturer, required a faster, more effective way to manage Bill-of-Materials (BOM) data while designing production lines to serve its global market. They found a solution in Bommer, a plug-in for top CAD/CAM software that automates and accelerates their BOM processes. Using Bommer, Nemuno Banga achieved:
- Time savings. Complex BOM processes that once took two to three days can now be completed up to 90% faster.
- Accuracy. Automation reduces the risk of human error and enables more precision in project forecasts and budgets.
- Flexibility. Customization options allow streamlining BOM processes across a wide range of projects.
Challenges
Nemuno Banga manufactures filters for cigarettes and other smoking products for clients around the world. Headquartered in Lithuania, the company builds intricate, complex production lines to provide a broad range of filter styles to its global market. The engineers who design these production lines often document hundreds of components to create a Bill of Materials (BOM), which is critical to creating accurate estimates of project costs and materials requirements.
Nemuno Banga’s mechanical engineers create custom BOMs that document every part in their manufacturing line designs — screws, rivets, sheet metal, electric motors and other components often numbering in the hundreds. BOMs also lists the parts’ production process (milling, cutting, drilling, etc.) and the underlying materials (aluminum, stainless steel, plastic, etc.). They rely on the SOLIDWORKS CAD/CAM design platform, one of the top CAD/CAM design platforms to design their manufacturing lines, but these platforms often become a hindrance for engineers building BOMs. Building a BOM can require hours or days of painstaking manual effort.
“The standard Bill of Materials tools in these platforms can be impossible to use if you have a bigger assembly,” said Kęstas Stasiūnas, a machine design engineer at Nemuno Banga. For instance, a built-in CAD BOM tool might export 500 rows of data into a spreadsheet. Any unnecessary data must be removed manually. “That’s a lot of trash for us to clean up,” Stasiūnas added. “It’s very time consuming.”
How Bommer Helped
Bommer is a simple BOM plugin for SOLIDWORKS. Bommer gives Stasiūnas and his engineering colleagues tools to automate and simplify the process of creating BOMs. This saves them hours of manually combing through parts lists to ensure that everything in a design document aligns with the components available from a distributor.
Bommer provides a “live view” of a design document’s properties across an entire production assembly. It supports “one-click” filtering and exporting of BOM information, which optimizes the process and makes it much easier for Nemuno Banga engineers to create precise, accurate projections of expenses and other crucial project variables.
“When I'm finished building a model, I go through all the parts one by one. I enter the part number, materials, manufacturing type, fasteners and so on,” Stasiūnas said. Bommer stores this data in the SOLIDWORKS custom properties for each part.
Stasiūnas sorts this data by part number and then starts making his engineering drawings using the entered data. “After generating all the drawings, I can start sending out orders to the manufacturers and suppliers,” he said.
Results, Return on Investment and Future Plans
By incorporating Bommer automation into their machine-design processes, Nemuno Banga engineers can shave hours from their BOM processes, improving efficiency and reducing the potential for human errors.
“Let’s say I have a bigger project consisting of 100 to 200 components,” Stasiūnas said. “It used to take me about 20 hours to arrange all the drawings, check for errors, and send out the data on all of the components. With Bommer, I can do it in just a couple of hours, and be sure that nothing is missing.”
Bommer can be customized to suit the needs of a broad spectrum of CAD/CAM tasks. That gives Stasiūnas the flexibility to streamline his workday and adapt to new demands in the years to come. “For me, it's optimal,” he concluded. “I have a lot of freedom to configure it for myself, my company, and our specific requirements.”
“To put it simply, Bommer saves me a lot of frustration and hundreds of hours arranging BOM‘s”
— Kęstas Stasiūnas, Machine design engineer, Nemuno Banga
Authors
Kęstas Stasiūnas, Machine Design Engineer, Nemuno Banga
Jesse Rosalia, Co-founder/CEO, Bommer, Inc.
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