My employer wishes to design in Metric units but must purchase material (steel, aluminum, etc.) in English (US Customary) units. Currently, stock sizes are either hand typed into a custom property or pulled from sketch dimensions from a starter part. Both techniques are error prone and we'd like to use bounding boxes to source the stock size info but since the design documentation is all Metric, the stock dimensions that get flagged for export to our purchasing system are also Metric. This is doubly worse for weldment cut lists as the library descriptions are English but the cutoff length is metric. That's how you get 203.2 inches of 2x2 tubing when you only wanted 8 inches. Currently to avoid this, we change to English units, export the cut list chart to Excel then import the Excel file into the drawing as an image after the drawing has been changed back to Metric units. This gets us the info in the format we need but it is not interactive so if anything changes, the chart doesn't update (more errors).

So, is there any way to lock the units of dimensions (or global variables, etc.) regardless of the drawing/design units?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Solidworks Premium 2018 x64 Edition SP2.0

Windows 10 Pro

Intel Xeon CPU E5-2667 v4 @3.20GHz

64 GB Ram

Nvidia Quadro M5000