How do I use the BOM analyzer tool?
Ciiva’s new online BOM analyzer tool provides a quick and easy way to run a full analysis of your BOMs. Its main features include availability check, cost evaluation and lifecycle status report, which we believe are the most important and frequently requested functions.
Access the Analyzer
You can access the analyzer by clicking the BOM Analyzer button on Ciiva’s homepage. You don’t need to be a registered user to use it. However, signed-in users will have their uploaded BOMs automatically saved for re-evaluation in the future, whereas guests must upload the BOM every time an analysis is required.
For signed-in users, historical BOMs can be browsed by clicking the Analyzed BOMs button.
Upload a BOM
The analyzer tool accepts four file formats: Excel datasheet (.xls and .xlsx), comma-separated text (.csv) and tab delimited text (.txt).
When a file is uploaded, the tool will try to map the columns automatically. Please verify or select the three columns before you proceed to next step. Of the three columns, Manufacturer Part Number is required, Manufacturer and Quantity are optional. Quantity defaults to one if no column mapping is selected.
For the purpose of performance enhancement, all uploads are limited to 500 rows. If you have a larger file, please split it into smaller ones and upload them one by one.
If you upload an Excel file and it contains multiple datasheets, you can switch between the datasheets by selecting the respective tab headers.
Once you are ready, Start Analysis to continue to the next step.
Read the Analysis
On top of the analysis result is a summary of the most important statistics, including data coverage, product total cost and batch total cost. You can increase the batch size to see how it is reflected by the change of product and batch cost. There are also pie charts summarizing the spread of distributors as well as lifecycle status information.
Distributor chart shows the percentage of parts chosen by the tool to be sourced by a specific distributor. Only preferred distributors (see below) are included here.
Lifecycle chart shows the distribution of lifecycle status in the BOM. Ciiva has five lifecycle status: New, Volume Production, Not Recommended for New Design, End of Life and Obsolete.
The table that follows contains a list of information with regards to each part. Some of the parts may have several matches in our database and you can manually change the selection by clicking the blue button.
If the analyzer fails to find a match for some of your parts (marked as Not Found), tweaking the part number (e.g. removing underscores and other special characters) could improve the chance of them being matched.
You can define your own Preferred Distributors whose sku and price will be displayed in the distributor columns. By default User Preferred Distributors is ticked, which means only preferred distributors are considered when determining the selected distributor and price.
The tool is programmed to select distributors who offer the lowest price. Alternatively, you can change the mode to Manual and choose the distributors yourself.
Every part is asscociated with three prices. Unit price, Line Price (unit price * quantity) and Batch Price (line price * batch size). In case the MOQ (minimum order quantiy) is greater than the batch quantity, Residual Quantity denotes their difference.
Export Data
You can export the report to a csv file. The file contains distributor and pricing information, as well as the original BOM data.