Stock Lists

[Duncan303]

Hoping someone can help me out here with something I'm trying to do with Form Z that would make our companies life a lot easier.

 

We  work in the events infrastructure business and put together a lot of plans and concepts for temporary structures, a lot of times these are made from Alloy Box Truss sections, I have a file with all our lengths and connections made up and I just use as building blocks. See attached screenshot for what I mean. We also have a variety of other connections, types of truss etc. These structures vary in size from small 'boxes' 6mx6mx6m to covering whole sites (40mx30m), or forming partitions, screens etc etc.

 

At present I'll put together plans and our production manager will go through manually and put together a pick list for the crew.

 

I'd like to have somewhere in my capabilities in Form Z to have loaded in the quantities of truss we have in stock and the ability when I draft up a set of plans be able to add a table of quantities which list out the elements required to build the structures.

 

Was wondering if 'components' would be an option i could explore, I don't use them much and have found them a little quirky to be honest.

 

Wondering if Form Z can do anything like this?

 

Thanks for any suggestions on this in advance.

 

duncan

[Tech]

Hi Duncan,

 

You don't need to create Components, just Boolean or Join the parts into a single object, name it appropriately, and then use the Attributes and / or the Information Management to generate a list of these items.  The beginning of this post should help you get going in the right direction:

 

http://forums.formz.com/index.php?/topic/659-formz-information-management-output-to-cutlistplus-for-woodworkers/

 

Does that help?

[Duncan303]

Hi Tech,

 

Yeah the beginning of the post about cultist data certainly helps. The files I have for the truss are set up so each piece is a single object and named appropriately. I'll use Information Management to create my lists.

What would be nice though is being able to add these lists to my drawings in layout. At present the only way I can see of adding a table of quantities is to export a CVS file and then import into Excel(or similar application) and then piece this together with my drawing in illustrator(using pdf from Layout), potentially not the the most efficient work flow.

Seems like the fundamentals are there in the modelling to create these lists but just need the ability to transfer that information into layout somehow.

thanks