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A $2 million project for a shop sounds like a huge achievement, but it can also be a huge challenge to even get the job ready for the shop.
James Nelson, a mechanical engineer at Samson Metal Engineering and Manufacturing in Lakeland, Florida, experienced this scenario in late 2021. It took four engineers six 40-hour weeks to extract information from PDF files and create bill of materials tables that could then be used to create items such as supply lists, labor cost estimates and production process plans.
“The whole shop was waiting for us to schedule labor and order materials to get the job done,” Nelson recalled. “So there’s no real progress until all the drawings are done. You can’t really start a job until all that is sorted out.”
Meanwhile, as usual, the client was constantly changing prints and drawings with engineering revisions. Nelson said each revision was almost like a restart of the project and required manual updating of all elements related to the project.
This major success for Samson, Nelson says, exposed the inefficiencies associated with creating tabular information from PDF documents. Sure, a metal fabricator might occasionally receive a CAD model from which they can cleanly extract data because they’re using the same CAD platform as the customer, but in most cases a contract manufacturer is working with customer PDFs from which data isn’t as easy to extract. In some cases, data can be copied from a PDF if it was created digitally, but even then the task isn’t accomplished very quickly.
Nelson has been in the metal fabrication business for seven years, having previously worked for some of the larger theme park companies in Central Florida. During that time, he realized he needed to find a better way to extract much-needed data from a file format that wasn’t really designed for it.
Ted Van Winkle, engineering manager at Samson Metal, has the same background as Nelson in the entertainment industry, but he has nearly 10 years of experience in contract manufacturing. He’s been at Samson Metal long enough to see the company take on more customers in the aerospace and power generation industries, so he also knows the inefficiencies that frustrate Nelson.
“There’s a new generation coming up in the industry, and they can’t be successful without our advice,” Van Winkle said. “On the other hand, we can’t be successful with software and technology without their help.”
Nelson has helped Samson Metal with some software improvements of his creation over the past few years and believes the rest of the metal fabrication industry may be interested in these developments. He is willing to share his BOM extractor and job planning tool, BOM TabulatorPDF, with the public.
What the software can do
Nelson said other expensive software products, while able to extract data from CAD models, struggle with PDFs or don’t cover the broad range of manufacturing activities such as sawing, machining and welding, so he knows his software product can fill an important gap in the market.
The BOM Tabulator software enables the automatic nesting of beams and tubes once the information has been imported from the customer drawings and the parts lists have been completed.
“We’re talking about reducing the time associated with takeoff and planning by easily 70%,” he said.
The software uses an optical character recognition feature to scan each PDF and filter out important information such as part numbers, dimensions, part quantities and purchasing requirements. It then uses all of this information to create:
- Formatted BOM tables with consistent column formatting for part number, supplier, part description and quantity.
- An indented drawing tree/BOM table that can be used as a project summary.
- Suggestions for nesting plates and sheets, to help determine how much material is needed for the job, and cutting instructions for the laser or waterjet machine.
- Nesting of beams, pipes and conduits, and a cut list for saw operators. (Nelson said cut list drawings will be part of later software releases.)
- An overview of all fasteners and commercial items, such as motors, required for the job. The software can recognize the relationship between packaging and fastener (e.g. a box usually contains 100 screws), which helps in creating detailed purchasing instructions. The software also adds some extra fasteners to each order in case spare parts are needed.
- Estimates of the surface area of the parts to be painted or powder coated, the cost of the coating materials and the amount of labor required.
- Calculations of part and assembly weights help with shipping planning.
Nelson said the software is “acceptable” at reading the data from the PDFs. All of these BOMs and tables need to be reviewed to ensure the information is correct, but for the most part, it should eliminate the need to spend hours gathering and manually entering data into a spreadsheet.
And when the inevitable engineering changes occur and the BOMs need to be updated, the engineer only has to change the numbers in the main table and the software takes care of updating all related BOMs and tables.
“You don’t have to calculate all of this manually,” Nelson said. “You don’t have to keep track of how it affects everything else.”
In a future version of the software, the BOM Tabulator will be able to extract geometries and use this information in formulas that help produce more accurate estimates. Additionally, users will be able to allocate labor hours based on these estimates and then send this information to an ERP/MRP system.
Samson Metal has been benefiting from BOM Tabulator programming for several months, and Nelson said he believes other metal fabricators may be looking for similar help. That’s one reason he’ll be demonstrating the software at FABTECH in Orlando, Florida, Oct. 15-17 in booth W5584. (The other reason is that Nelson is looking for companies to help him test the software. He said he’ll start testing with those metal fabricators in early 2025.)
Looking back on the $2 million contract his company won, Nelson said he believes a full-fledged PDF BOM extractor and job scheduling software tool could have enabled one engineer to do the work of the four engineers who tackled the massive project in that six-week period. Perhaps that one engineer could have completed the work in four weeks. When these administrative tasks are taken care of by software, engineers have more time to focus on activities that can save the company money or potentially generate new revenue. That’s a recipe for financial profitability in today’s incredibly competitive metal fabrication market.
BOM Tabulator software is designed to pull information from PDFs and compile BOMs and tables to avoid excessive manual data entry that can consume a lot of an engineer’s time. One of the benefits of the software is the ability to create a summary BOM that includes part numbers, suppliers, part descriptions and quantities.
