Boost Engineering Efficiency with CAD2BOM

If your engineers are still retyping the same bill of materials from a CAD drawing into your ERP, this session shows exactly what that process looks like once it’s automated. The presenter walks through CAD2BOM — a native plugin (not a bolted-on integration) that works specifically with SolidWorks and Inventor, pushing a completed design directly into what Genius calls a “bill of manufacturing”: not just materials, but routing, subcontracting, and more. The live demo is the real value here — pushing a “pallet cart” assembly from SolidWorks into Genius, watching the system flag which parts already exist versus which are brand new, catching a real discrepancy between a CAD description and Genius’s own record, and applying a routing template with default hours that scheduling can refine later. A second demo shows the harder problem: managing an engineer-to-order project through multiple design revisions, pushing newly added parts into an already-released job with a clear green/blue visual legend, and even purchasing or starting production on long-lead items before the drawing is technically finished. If double data entry between your CAD software and your ERP is still costing your engineering team real hours every week, this is a good look at the alternative.

What You’ll Learn In This Webinar

Chapter 1 — Unique Features of Genius for Custom Manufacturing

After a quick Genius overview (roughly 30 years in business — the first five spent as engineering consultants before moving into ERP software — about 120 employees, thousands of users across the US and Canada, a 96% customer retention rate, and around 25% annual growth), the presenter highlights what makes Genius unique: it’s built specifically for engineer-to-order, configure-to-order, and make-to-order manufacturing, with CAD2BOM as a signature feature, industry-leading DBR scheduling (the subject of a separate webinar by colleague Frank), and accessible, buildable dashboards through Genius Analytics (also covered in its own webinar) — all wrapped in full functional coverage from quote to cash.

Chapter 2 — Training and Support Through Genius Academy

Genius Academy offers videos and exercises that get updated alongside every new feature or version release, useful both for initial implementation and for training new employees into a specific role later on. A recurring “canteen” session — an hour-long, ask-the-expert format — runs three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) for open questions.

Chapter 3 — Introduction to CAD2BOM

CAD2BOM breaks down as CAD (computer-assisted design) plus BOM — which, in Genius’s own terminology, means a bill of manufacturing rather than just a bill of materials, since it also includes routing, subcontracting, and more. It’s a native plugin (not a third-party bolt-on) available specifically for SolidWorks and Inventor, and it works in both directions: pushing a completed design into Genius, and pushing select information (like descriptions or parameters) back into the CAD software to keep one consistent source of truth.

Chapter 4 — Benefits of Integrating CAD with ERP

The core benefits: eliminating double data entry between CAD and the ERP, preventing duplicate item creation (the system recognizes when an item already exists rather than recreating it), and managing the complexity of multi-version, progressive-release engineering common in complex engineer-to-order projects. In a live demo, the presenter pushes a “pallet cart” assembly from SolidWorks into Genius’s BOM library: a hammer icon marks manufactured parts, a dollar-sign icon marks purchased/raw material, and a plus icon flags brand-new items not yet in the system. A yellow warning triangle flags a real discrepancy (a mismatched description between the CAD file and Genius), with a configurable default for which system’s data wins and the option to override it as a one-time exception. A routing template (in this case, “assembly and shipping”) pushes in with default hours that can either be finalized by engineering or deliberately left at zero for scheduling to fill in later. The presenter also shows the underlying setup: mapping SolidWorks custom properties (or Inventor’s iProperties) to Genius fields once, reused automatically on every future push, with a special “family” field that pre-fills most required Genius fields based on an item’s category so not everything needs to be mapped by hand. Live Q&A covers: supported SolidWorks/Inventor versions depend on the customer’s Genius version (validated within a couple of months of a new release, available on request as a spec sheet); CAD2BOM works with or without a CAD Vault; and the reverse direction (ERP to CAD) syncs corrected terminology back to the CAD file so production and purchasing don’t have to keep correcting the same mismatched descriptions over and over.

“So all in one, as you can see here, that’s if it’s the first time using Genius, that’s how a bill of manufacturing will look like.” — presenter, on CAD2BOM’s output

Chapter 5 — Managing Complex ETO Projects with Genius

Concurrent (or simultaneous) engineering — involving production, engineering, and purchasing from the very start of a project rather than in sequence — is presented as a way to shorten development time and let production begin before drawings are fully complete, with benefits including lower cost, faster development, reduced lead time, better quality, and improved customer satisfaction (a separate webinar covers concurrent engineering in more depth). Genius’s engineering lifecycle tool manages multiple BOM versions and revisions over a project’s life, typically starting from an early, rough “estimated” version at the sales-quote stage and evolving through engineering’s full CAD2BOM push into production. In a live demo, a new revision adds a part that wasn’t in an already-released job (due to an incomplete design or a customer-requested change); a color-coded legend (green = matches, blue = added in engineering but not yet in the job) shows exactly what needs to be synced, with three options to add it — reserve (already in stock), produce (make it from scratch), or let the system decide automatically based on stock availability. The presenter also covers preliminary purchases and preliminary production: the ability to purchase a long-lead item (like a motor with a six-month lead time) or start production before the design is fully finalized, with the system automatically linking that early purchase or production run to the correct part once the design is complete — avoiding both duplicate and missed purchases.

Chapter 6 — Dashboard and Analytics for Production Management

A Genius Analytics dashboard example shows how to track concurrent engineering activity across a project — where multiple engineers stand, what’s been pushed to production versus what hasn’t — with a pointer to a separate, more detailed webinar on concurrent engineering. In closing live Q&A: sorting by a drawing’s balloon number is supported as long as that field is populated on push; CAD2BOM is an add-on, not included in the base Genius license, with cost depending on factors like user count (best directed to a sales rep or customer success); whether a pushed part is treated as manufactured or purchased comes from a property (often pre-set by the item’s “family,” but changeable at any time); drawing attachments are supported, defaulting to a native SolidWorks link/viewer or a saved PDF; there’s no confirmed roadmap plan (as far as the presenter was aware) to extend CAD2BOM to AutoCAD, though Excel-based import/export can mimic similar functionality in the meantime; and any field in a pushed BOM can be manually corrected after the fact, even though the “which source wins” resolution only applies automatically to fields flagged as different at the moment of the push.