For the last couple months I've been working on and off on a way to make our weldment design process more efficient.

In the past the company has done weldments the old fashion way where each part of the weldment was a part and the weldment was an assembly. This allowed any characteristic in the part to be brought through to the BOM in the Weldment/Assembly.

I've been attempting to do the same thing with weldments with little success. Without being able to do this it's been a rather difficult, understandably so, convincing the company to move to SW weldments. Without being able to create a template that has these characteristics already in them moving to SW weldments is actually MORE manual entry than the other method.

Here is an example. Currently every part of every weldment has a part number. That part number consists of the main assembly number and a -01, -02 etc etc. So if we were making weldment ABC123 the first part would be ABC123-01, second part ABC123-02 and so on. For SW weldments this is essentially \$PRP:"SW-File Name""SW-CutListItemName". The issue is that, again to my knowledge, the only way to get that into the actual cut list item is by entering. Half the time cut and paste doesn't even work properly as it takes the characteristics of the part you copied it from and you have to go back and change it. If you create the weldment from parts you essentially are making an assembly. Rather than a weldment part template you have a regular part template with weldment part characteristics. That template simply has "SW=File Name" as a custom property and it automatically populates when you start the part. That characteristic is then brought into the assembly and shows up in the BOM.

It just seems that no matter what I try, templates, profile templates and so on there appears to be more manual entry and more working using SW weldments than the old method.

In the perfect world it would work like this and if this is possible in some way please let me know.

1) Create a weldment template with all the characteristics you want in both the weldment and for the parts in the cutlist.

2) Create part from template.

3) All the pieces created for the weldment have characteristics added to them

4) create drawing add BOM and it's auto populated.

Again, if there is a way to get there I've not been able to find it. There are two issues that seem to be the biggest problem. First is the "Part number" which would consist of the file name and cut list name. Second is the fact that it does not seem that a template for weldments carries over any items in the actual created weldment part. Each weldment requires the user to add all the characteristics to the main weldment after it's created.

Thanks for any input