Hi Joerg,
Joerg said:
Have you guys found a system that does that?
Sort of.
For production items we use ORCAD and it was previously tied into a home-grown
database. The guy who wrote the database maintenance program was a
(particularly good) summer intern, so when he left it began to slowly fall
into disarray and it became clear that some of the program's architecture was
not as conducive to getting design work done as we'd have liked. Still, while
it was maintained it did prove valuable.
Flash forward to the present. We're currently installing one of those big,
fancy MRP systems and our ("not a database programmer") IT guy has been tasked
with getting it integrated with ORCAD. I know that he's encountered some
problems while doing so, but sooner or later all of this is supposed to come
together and make life a little bit easier again in that generated BOMs will
have correct manufacturers' part numbers in them.
This has been taking longer than the company originally anticipated, but I've
been involved with the adoption of "big fancy MRP systems" at a previous
company and I'm personally not surprised. Such systems often seem to consume
enormous amounts of a company's time and money before they begin producing
useful results!
But picking parts from MRP into an open schematic page, with pricing popping
up and stuff, nope, didn't do it.
This is what ORCAD CIS does (lets you browse a database that can have whatever
fields you want, e.g., component name, type, value, manufacturer's part no.,
price, etc.). It doesn't do it as well as it should -- every time you go to
place another database part it collapses the tree of all your parts categories
and has several other productivity-sapping annoyances -- but it does work.
Pulsonix has their database connectivity option that claims it'll do the same
things -- and in a somewhat less brain-dead manner -- but I've only read the
documentation for it and not actually tried it out on a real project. From
past discussions on here Protel and CADStar claim some degree of database
connectivity as well.
---Joel