Including Supply Chain Information in a Static BOM

Old Content - visit altium.com/documentation
Modified by Admin on Mar 4, 2014

 

Contents

Altium Designer provides the ability to include vault-based supply-chain information in your Bill of Materials. This gives you the most realistic 'snap-shot' yet of pricing and availability of the physical, real-world components – components that you have sanctioned to represent the components in your design when the board is manufactured and assembled. This feature simply includes parametric data for each of the solutions available for your vault-based Unified Components, determined by the Part Choices you have made for those components. Armed with the resulting empowered BOM, informed choices can be made by the Procurement Team, and a board spin fully costed. And each time you access the BOM, the vault is interrogated and refreshed, ensuring the latest supply-chain data is loaded and utilized in the BOM. Nasty surprises of 'stock unavailability' or 'price increases' are kept to a minimum, with the designer able to act quickly to resolve any costly price blow-out or delay in getting the product to market!

Supply chain data for vault-based Unified Components is only available when generating a Bill of Materials for the project. It is not available when generating a Bill of Materials for a PCB document, and is also not included when generating a Simple BOM.

It is important to note that this feature will only include vault information provided you have defined Part Choices for the vault-based components used in your design. Although resident in a vault – a vault-based component – it is the addition of Part Choices that turns the humble design component into a truly Unified Component – spanning both Design and Supply Chain areas of product development. For more detailed information, see Part Catalog and Part Choices.

Access

To include the supply-chain data for vault-based components in your BOM, simply enable the Include Parameters From Vault option, at the bottom of the Bill of Materials dialog. The information from the applicable vault in which the Component Items reside will be added at the bottom of the All Columns region – below standard parameters, and any database and/or PCB parameters.

Including vault-based supply-chain data in a Bill of Materials.

Parameters from an Altium Vault are distinguished in the list by use of the  icon, similar to the way in which other icons are used to distinguish parameters sourced from a linked Database or PCB.

Solutions

The data is presented as a number of Solutions. This directly relates to the concept of Solutions presented in the Supply-Chain aspect for a Component Item, when viewed in the Vaults panel. Remember that Solutions are determined based on the Part Choices you make, with each Solution involving:

  • A Manufacturer and associated part number.
  • A Supplier and associated part number.
  • Pricing and Availability information.

The number of Solutions for a particular Component Item will depend on how many manufacturer (real-world) parts are added to its associated Part Choice List, and how many of the supported (and enabled) Suppliers vend those parts. In terms of the number of distinct solutions added to the BOM, this is simply determined by the Component Item used in the design that has the greatest number of Solutions.

The information included in the BOM is from the supply-chain Solutions for each Component Item used in the design, which are determined by the Part Choices made for those Items.

Included Data

Each Solution listed in the Bill of Materials dialog contains a sub-set of supply-chain data that can be included in a Bill of Materials.

Supply-chain data for each solution.

For any given Solution n, these are:

  • Manufacturer n – name of the Manufacturer who makes the chosen part.
  • Manufacturer Part Number n – part number for the chosen Manufacturer part.
  • Supplier n – name of the Supplier vending the chosen Manufacturer part (from the Available Suppliers listed on the Data Management – Suppliers page of the Preferences dialog).
  • Supplier Currency n – alphabetic code for the chosen currency used for pricing data.
  • Supplier Order Qty n – number of units required to fulfill the desired production quantity of the product.
  • Supplier Part Number n – part number used by the Supplier for the vended Manufacturer part.
  • Supplier Stock n – how many units of the chosen part are current held in stock by the Supplier.
  • Supplier Subtotal n – the Supplier Order Qty multiplied by the Supplier Unit Price, giving the subtotal for that part.
  • Supplier Unit Price n – cost, per unit, charged by the Supplier for the chosen part.

Toggling the Show state checkbox to the right of a parent Solution entry will globally enable/disable inclusion of its parameters in the BOM. You can of course enable/disable inclusion of each of these parameters individually too.

Example supply-chain data in a BOM.

Preferred Suppliers Choice

When making Part Choices, a large number of solutions may be returned, from a number of Suppliers who vend a chosen Manufacturer Part. Affording some level of control over approved Suppliers that can be used when procuring parts for manufacturing, the Solutions returned based on defined Part Choices take into account which Suppliers are enabled for use – on the Data Management – Suppliers page of the Preferences dialog. This, in turn, flows on to the information presented for the Solutions in the BOM.

Enable your preferred Suppliers as part of your Data Management Preferences. Part Choice solutions will follow these preferences.

Preferred Suppliers Priority

In addition to controlling which Suppliers are used in obtaining Part Choice solutions, you can also prioritize those Suppliers that you do use. This too is performed from the Data Management – Suppliers page of the Preferences dialog. Simply select a Supplier in the list, then use the Move Up or Move Down buttons below the list to change that Supplier's position in the overall order. The Supplier at the top of the list has top priority.

Use the controls provided to determine a priority order in which preferred Suppliers are used.

This order is taken into account during BOM generation so that supply-chain data for more preferred Suppliers will be associated with lower Solution indexes. For example, if Digi-Key is preferred to Mouser but both are enabled (authorized Suppliers to use for procurement) then simply ensure that Digi-Key is positioned above Mouser in the list of Suppliers (given higher priority).

The example image below illustrates how this priority works. In this case two Manufacturer parts are available from both Digi-Key and Mouser. First Digi-Key is given the highest priority (above Mouser and other enabled Suppliers). Solution 1 (with Supplier 1) is therefore associated with Digi-Key. Solution 2 (with Supplier 2) would be associated with Mouser, and so on. Then Mouser is moved above Digi-Key, resulting in it now becoming associated with Solution 1, since it now enjoys preferred status over Digi-Key.

Example effect on BOM data when changing priority of preferred Suppliers.

Of course, if a chosen Manufacturer part is available only from a Supplier further down in the priority stakes, then it will be associated with Solution 1 in the BOM.

You are reporting an issue with the following selected text and/or image within the active document: