At a previous workplace, the accounting program (SAP) was being manually updated with input from the CAD development program (Inventor). This led to costly errors, ordering outdated parts and assemblies.
To prevent such errors in the future, I wrote a VBA program to export Bills of Materials from SAP and CAD to perform an automatic comparison. I chose VBA to seamlessly integrate into a platform already available at the company. Due to restricted SAP scripting access, an automated SAP_BOM export is achieved by simulated keystrokes.
To identify and meet user requirements I went through several iterations with my colleagues. During these iteration steps, the user interface was extended by:
- Display separate lists to show IDs which are only present in either CAD or SAP
- Display differences in the assembly tree
- Option to ignore certain number circles, e.g. for raw material only shown in SAP or subcomponents only included in CAD
- Option to import several sets of BOM raw data for multiple comparisons
I am happy to know that this program is still in use even 2+ years after I left the company on 30.09.2020 due to a Covid savings initiative.