A bill of materials (BOM) lists all the parts and components required to build a given product. Maintaining clean, accurate BOMs is crucial for efficient electronics manufacturing and procurement. However, initial BOMs generated from ECAD tools often contain incomplete, inconsistent or ambiguous part data that must get corrected.
This article covers simple techniques to refine and enrich your electronics BOMs by leveraging Octopart’s powerful part search engine. By autocompleting missing fields, standardizing descriptors and consolidating purchases, Octopart streamlines BOM management critical for driving prototyping through high-volume production.
Why Clean Your BOM
Before diving into the how-to details when using Octopart for BOM cleansing, understanding the importance provides motivation.
Avoid Procurement Delays
Incomplete part numbers, missing supplier links and confusing specifications hamper component sourcing, dragging out procurement cycles. Clean data speeds purchasing.
Reduce Manual Entry Errors
Ambiguous rows force manual lookup and entry increasing mistakes risk during translation into purchasing and assembly systems. Automating enrichment reduces mismatches.
Improve Change Management
Standardized BOMs simplify version control and change monitoring by eliminating random supplier variations. Normalize entries for clean diffs between revisions.
Enable Automated Processes
Structured data facilitates scripted systems to drive automated procurement, assembly planning, test coverage and simulation flows improving efficiency.
Support Contract Manufacturers
Clean BOMs with all required procurement fields populated accelerate handoff to contract manufacturing partners earning their appreciation through professional deliverables.
While BOM cleansing demands initial investment, sizable benefits over product lifetimes justify costs.
Octopart Capabilities Overview
Before utilizing Octopart’s capabilities to remediate BOM issues, first understand available tools.
Part Search Engine
Octopart’s core function assists Engineers finding components starting from minimal details by searching across thousands of suppliers to identify matches by SKU, datasheets or parametric specifications. Reports consolidate into a parts database encompassing over 700 million listings and growing daily.
BOM File Import
BOMs exported from various EDA tools upload allowing batch automated partlookup directly within file lists to fill missing elements like manufacturer parts numbers, product links, lifecycle status, pricing etc automatically offline.
BOM Checker
Online batch validation highlights entries with missing crucial fields, duplicate entries, mismatching references designators, end-of-life warnings and other common problems for fixing prior to release.
BOM Tool Integrations
Octopart’s API allows custom integration directly into other BOM software tools through plugins simplifying access to search tools without needing to export/import files manually.
These abilities combine to correct issues efficiently.
Initial BOM Import
Transition original BOMs into Octopart for enrichment:
Exporting from Source EDA Tools
Most PCB design tools like Altium, KiCAD, Eagle etc provide BOM generation utilities. Alternatively extract lists directly from schematics or layout documents. Target file formats include CSV, Excel and XML for compatibility.
Uploading BOMs
Navigate to Octopart’s Upload page clicking “Upload BOM” button, selecting desired file then confirming details detected properly in preview. Uploads run securely through SSL by default.
Monitoring Processing
Larger uploads may take several minutes as Octopart analyzes each line item against internal databases to extract known elements into discrete fields. Dialogs indicate progress.
Downloading Enriched BOMs
Once processing finishes, download the enhanced BOM now containing additional columns with supplementary information populated by lookups to use offline going forward.
Uploading BOMs into Octopart only takes moments while automated improvements often require hours tackling manually otherwise.
BOM Enrichment Details
Understand changes applied to BOMs by Octopart’s inference algorithms:
Parsed Manufacturer Parts Numbers
Most crucial addition, identified MPNs link parts to manufacturer ordering systems establishing procurement chain.
Manufacturer Links
Supplier website URLs guide purchasing paperwork further confirming sourcing.
Lifecycle Flags
Alerts indicate discontinued or end-of-life components needing substitution before release.
Price Estimates
While approximate, useful to gauge budgetary feasibility during early design stages for major cost drivers identified.
Product Image References
Visual confirmations useful identifying physical specifications like package sizes especially early seeking general components.
Package Details
Help standardizing mechanical dimensions for design integration needs.
Minimum Order Quantities
Informs early procurement inevitabilities guiding volume decisions for custom parts beyond prototyping.
Functional Category Tags
Classification aids downstream file management categorizing types for re-use.
These incremental improvements simplify BOM handling.
BOM Verification Online
While uploading BOMs works well enriching individual files, Octopart’s online checker consolidates global fixes across editions.
Uploading BOMs for Verification
Navigate to Octopart’s Checker utility, drag/drop target spreadsheet for analysis, then click “Check My BOM” initiating automated validation routines hunting common issues.
Reviewing Results Summary
Reports tally detected problems by:
- Missing crucial fields
- Inaccurate reference designators
- Duplicate entries
- Deprecated components
- Costly specific substitutions
Green/Red color coding visually summarizes severity as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Octopart BOM Checker Results summarize issues
Accessing Details
Inspector expands errors allowing notes export to drive remediation back in source system:
- Annotation guidance
- Links to suggested alternative parts
- Lifecycle status warnings
This arbitrates corrections uniformly.
Rechecking Iteratively
Rerun uploads after making corrections to confirm fixes address flagged issues closing gaps.
Online validation provides exhaustive oversightuncovering subtle issues more easily than manual reviews across potentially thousands of BOM lines.
Automating BOM Management
Instead of needing to continually export, upload and check BOMs across status changes, integrating Octopart deeper into design flows via API eliminates hassle.
Native Tool Integrations
Octopart plugins available for various BOM tools like:
- Arena Solutions
- FactoryFour
- FlexGenIUS
- TotalBOM
- Valor Expedition
These eliminate the Export/Upload/Download steppattern simplify invoking advanced functions.
Scripted BOM Manipulation
Programmatically generate, enrich and validate BOMs leveraging Octopart’s REST API through scripts wrapping:
- Upload call
- Polling for results
- Download enriched file
This automates bulk operations behind the scenes.
Configurable Rules Checking
Custom validation scripts codify business rules beyond basics for automated part policy enforcement:
- Required supplier restrictions
- Conditional cost thresholds
- lifecycle tracking
- Design reuse monitoring
Rules maintain standards at scale.
While manual checking suffices initially, API level integration better supports progressive automation scaling up.
Additional Octopart Capabilities
Beyond fundamental BOM manipulation tools, additional features enhance management.
BOM Comparison
Identify changes between BOM versions easily highlighting adds, removes, and updates - critical for complex product maintenance and audits.
Batch BOM Uploads
Process bulk groups of BOMs in one operation when making major design package changes rather than incrementally with folder drag-and-drop support.
Multi-Format Exports
Extract enriched BOM datasets into other business systems like ERPs while maintaining crucial supplemented fields for execution hand-off.
Dashboard Reporting
Consolidate project status across releases tracking lifecycle curves, orphaned parts, cost breakdowns and other analytics for insights.
API Low-Level Access
For advanced cases, directly query base search data in JSON format facilitating one-off scripts consolidating programmatic access.
Figure 2: Sample Octopart Dashboard analytics
Extend BOM management scalability by connecting Octopart into broader electronics workflows.
Conclusion
Maintaining well-structured, consistently defined BOMs accelerate electronics sourcing, manufacturing and sustainment through complete, accurate data powering systems. Octopart provides both interactive manual tooling and API level foundations centralizing and refining BOMs programmatically those daunting tasks. By establishing control early and iteratively making incremental improvements during development, teams downstream receive clean information reducing delays securing parts availability for final products shipping smoothly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Octopart enrichment slow down my BOM processing?
Octopart’s uploaded automated batch annotations take under 1 minute for most BOMs speeding overall enrichment rate.
What file formats does Octopart support?
Currently, Excel XLSX, CSV and XML import while exporting those plus space delimited and JSON - covering
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