My company is going through some stages of rapid growth and with that comes the typical growing pains. We haven't yet set up an ERP system or established any sort of intelligent part numbering scheme. Currently we are struggling with accurate BOM's; we have a disconnect with engineering and production. There's one school of thought of having every single item baked into the SolidWorks model, whether it's a real part, or a dummy place holder for such things like consumables. The other school of thought is to keep those dummy items and consumables separate from the model in order to not inflate the file size to the point of them becoming unusable.

I would just like to poll everyone to see how they do it. What way have you seen work better vs. the other?