You can make your Bill of Materials (BOM) in SolidWorks say whatever you want for the name of a certain part?  But the command is not where you think it’d be!

Open the part you want to change, go to the Configurations Tab (no, that’s not a typo) and right click on the current configuration to choose “Properties”.

Change the “Bill of Materials Options” to “User Specified Name”, then enter ANYTHING you want to show as the part number in the BOM:

Use this to make custom internal part numbers, temporary names, or even “Blank” show in your BOMs while leaving your file names unchanged!

• You can rename these virtual components in the FeatureManager design tree, avoiding the need to open, save as a copy, and use the Replace Components command.
• You can make one instance of a virtual component independent of other instances in a single step.
• The folder where you store the assembly is not cluttered with unused part and assembly files resulting from iterations of component designs.

Some of the thinks that you have to watch out for are the inability to create a drawing of the virtual component.   To make a drawing of a virtual component, you must save it as an external file.  To save it as external you simply right mouse click on the file and save as External Part and it will ask for a file name and folder location.  Simple as that.

Now to really throw a wrench in the works, how do PDM systems track these virtual items?  Workgroup PDM will certainly let you add an assembly with a Virtual Part, but it has no means for really tracking it beyond the where used report.   There is a setting to turn this on in the User Options, but selecting this option has significant performance impact. and since a virtual part is ususally only used relative to one design, this setting may have a low return on investment.

Enterprise PDM actually handles these quite nicely and if a virtual component is being used, it is shown in the check in dialog box in reports as well as the BOM tab, which is really where you want it displayed.  Below is a quick video demonstrating the differences between Workgroup PDM and Enterprise PDM concerning virtual parts.