Best way to count items from AutoCAD plans?

[enimrun]

Hi!

 

To start this off, I have never used AutoCAD (or any other CAD-programs) in my life, my background is in sales. I currently work in a industrial manufacturing firm, and we provide for example HVAC-solutions to large buildings etc. As of now, our sales team gets these big A1-sized plans designed with AutoCAD, and we need to manually go through each plan to find out e.g. how many valves or such items we need to sell. This of course feels like a outdated and inefficient way of working. What would be the best way to do this? Is there any way to automate this counting process? Maybe there is a software that crunches the data for you and makes a list of item quantities? I tried to Google it and found services like Cadmatic, MagiCAD, OpenBOM and BOM Extractor, would any of these work? I also found mentions of AutoCAD's own data extraction tool, how about that?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

[Cad64]

I guess my first question would be, who is creating the plans? Do you have drafters in house who are creating the CAD files or do you get the plans from an outside consultant?

 

If the plans are coming from an outside consultant, are they willing to provide the CAD files to you?

 

If you have drafters creating the plans, there are ways for Autocad to do the counting, which is basically automatic. No manual counting is needed, as long as things like valves are inserted into the drawing as blocks with unique names to identify them. The drafters could simply use the BCOUNT command to have Autocad count all the blocks in the drawing. Then they could input the quantities into a table and place it on the drawing so it's there on the printout.

 

Also, if the blocks contain attribute information such as valve size, manufacturer, price, etc., the drafter could use the Data Extraction Wizard to generate a table containing all relevant information.

 

Here's a video showing how data extraction works.