Working on your Demand Management list through the BOM Insight viewer can help you to identify high-risk parts and factors within your current demand. Best practices can incorporate this functionality to help you clean your demand list, identify parts that are obsolete or with unknown MPNs, and check the coverage risk.
Choose from suggested replacements or alternates as available from Supplyframe’s Suggestions or Xref Form Fit & Function Equivalents to mitigate risk or clean your parts. There's a “Last Pick” functionality allowing you to mass-correct unknown MPNs with your company's last chosen corrections. Market data and part intelligence are available at this functionality as well.
To get started, click on View in BOM Insight. This will switch you from "Demand View" to the view within Supplyframe's built-in BOM Insight module.
Once in the BOM Insight view, you'll need to first click on the Refresh All button in order to ensure that you see all available details on your parts. Otherwise, data may be incomplete or outdated.
Correcting Parts
You can use the BOM Insight Filter Toolbar on the left to review certain groups of parts, such as by: Status, Category, Life Cycle Status, Suppliers Coverage, Alternates Coverage, Manufacturers, and Suppliers.
You can click on the red Parts that need attention to highlight parts detected as likely needing to be corrected, stock evaluation, or alternates.
Suggestions for Correcting Parts
For parts with No exact match for its MPN, when available it will make suggestions for correcting it in the Manufacturer / Supplier column.
When there are more "suggested parts" available in addition to the first one listed, then you can click into the cell to see all results.
When you click on the Manufacturer Part Number / Supplier cell, then you may see the following tabs:
- “Did you Mean?”
- Supplyframe’s suggestions for possibly correcting a part.
- Xref Form Fit Function Equivalents (available for corrected parts)
- Alternates that have been identified (cross-referenced) as having the same form, same fit, and same functional equivalency to your original part.
- Function Equivalents
- Alternates cross-referenced as being only functionally equivalent (not the same form/fit).
- Part Master Alternates
- Suggestions from your Part Master.
- Where Used
- Additional lists where this part has been quoted within your company.
Click on Replace to correct your part to that selection from the Did you mean? list of suggestions.
You can click on Add to include results as an alternative part while keeping the original as well. The "Add" functionality is typically used when locating alternates and not for correcting parts.
The Compare icon can be clicked on in order to see a side by side comparison of your original loaded part against that specific option.
Last Pick and Bulk Corrections
Within the Manufacturer / Supplier of parts needing to be corrected, you may see the option of the Use Last Pick button to click. The Last Pick functionality helps you to automatically mass-correct your list with your previously chosen corrections within BOM Insight for those parts as needed. This can be helpful to maintain accuracy across your team and exponentially save you time in researching part corrections.
As you hover over the Use Last Pick button, it will display the part number last used to correct this line item. When you click on the button, it will automatically apply your company's last correction and populate for that MPN's details.
You also have the option to correct parts in bulk. Click on Select All and then on Accept Suggestions to have Supplyframe automatically choose the best-detected replacement for the parts in that filter view. When there's multiple pages of parts, then a message will ask if you want to select all items within your list when there’s more than one page of items. Click the message link to enable all pages.
The Accept button within a line item will enable you to correct parts one at a time as well from that listed suggestion. After you've cleaned all your parts, you can clear a filter by clicking on the X to the right of its name in order to see all your parts again.
Pricing Details
Within the Price cell for a line item, you may notice a blue exclamation “!”. This highlight indicates that your IPN line item was priced by from a different Manufacturer or MPN.
When you click on the Price cell of a line item, it opens the price details window to display as available the Price Analysis for a part in the first tab. Then all price results found from your Price Source selections on subsequent tabs.
Action Toolbar in BOM Insight
There are additional features found in the top toolbar while in the BOM Insight view that may be particularly useful.
These functionalities include:
- Project
- Edit
- Seetings
- Info
- Export
- Change Ownership
- Consolidate
- View
- All Filters
- Expand View
- Versions
- Add Version
- Compare Version
- Alerts
- *Demand View (Return to Demand Management - only visible when viewing a Demand list in BOM Insight Viewer)
- History
- Notes
- Intelligence
One of the most utilized features within BOM Insight is the BOM Intelligence. This is a unique functionality providing tremendous insightful data into your entire BOM. The intelligence provided is a consolidation of data from the part intelligence of all parts, thereby helping you to understand the makeup and risks of your entire BOM in one report.
The Alert functionality enables alerts notifying you of inventory changes, such as when parts become available or stock suppliers are falling short.
You can specify the alerts type, the notice frequency and its expiration date. Available alerts include:
- Unavailable parts match requested quantity
- Parts from specific distributors become available
- Previously available parts become unavailable
- Previously available parts from a specific supplier become unavailable
The History button shows historical activity for this list from both Demand Management and BOM Insight.
After cleaning your list and adding alternates as needed, click on Demand View to return to seeing your list within Demand Management.