I NEED to explain the title of this application. It probably does not make sense to most of the people who has never does BOM before. Bill of material is a list of items which required to build a product with multiple components of categories. For the engineering team to convey their required items to production line, they need to provide this list of items with quantity and other related information.
The initial method of doing BOM for this problem was by setting up an Excel file, type in the category, item code and quantity in respective column. Other information such as the drawing number of each item, revision of that particular drawing, material, thickness of sheet metal and the color coat of that item, these will be retrieved from a file called the master part list. Users do VLOOKUP formula in Excel to look up the item code from master part list and got all other information into BOM list file.
One can only imagine how many possible things can go wrong in a file like this. VLOOKUP formula may refering the wrong cell, link to the master part list broken due to no access to the file, inserting new line will mess up the formatting of the cell, and more. The process is tidious and very manual. So I wrote this application to reduce the user's effort down to 3 input only. Except the file name that will be saved; more on that later.
So to start, a name is needed from the user to save the unfinished work. Then user will key in the item code, category of the said item and the quantity. The application will take care of the rest. When they are done, click export to save and open an Excel file. If the work is done halfway, click save and come back later. Down in the window below, has a table format of the preview of the file. On the side, there is an up and down button to move a line or multiple line up or down.
Now for the logic of the code behind all of those, firstly the master part list will be read into a csv to simplify the file without format. There are 2 files during development, one in company server, another one in local storage for offline access. So the code will check for access server's copy else the local file will be used. During deployment, it will be removed from the code. The file will be imported into a SQL file for the application to access later. But the SQL is only created in memory. It will be wiped away once the application is done with it. To insert data into the table, user must type in the category, item code and quantity into the textbox, else it will prompt an error message. (While user is keying in the item code, there will be a preview of live result below the item code box. This is not pushed into GitHub page yet as of 19th Aug 2022, due to more updates and bugs are being fixed.)
After inserted into the table, user may delete rows, move one or multiple lines up or down, and the quantity of the items will be sumed up on the top. In the case of user tries to insert an item which is not found in the master part list, a Refresh Button will be activated (it was deactivated until this situation happened.) User may proceed to register the new item inside the master part list Excel file and click refresh button in the application. Then the item can be inserted into the table. After any insertion of items are done, the textbox of quantity will be cleared to prevent double-clicking the insert button.
Among the items, not all of them has a drawing. So before clicking insert, user may choose if that item has drawing or not. Then after the table is completed, user may load a file comprises of the drawing's revision, to be inserted into the table. This is required due to constant changing of the revision file, so it only should be loaded once the table is completed.
There is a menu bar up top which holds the load revision button and also the save and load button. While working halfway, the file can be saved as an Excel file with the name provided in the beginning of the application. The same file can be used to load into the application when user wants to resume the work.
Potential improvement in this application will be something like prompting user to save file before exiting, collecting the quantity of items of each BOM list into a database for further data visualization, collecting the quantity of each sheet metal thickness to know which kind of thickness is being used the most, save or write files only from server folders in order to let multi-users access and write the tables, and widgets that will adjust themselves as the window is being resized.
If you want to know any further about this application or any suggestions, please do contact me from the main page.