Including Supply Chain Data for Vault Components in the BOM

Parent page: Bill of Materials (BOM)

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' 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 can be fully costed. 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. Surprises of unavailable stock or price increases are kept to a minimum and you are able to act quickly to resolve costly price blow-outs or delays in getting the product to market.

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 Report Manager 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 or PCB parameters.

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

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 is determined by the Part Choices made for those Items.

Included Data

Each Solution listed in the Bill of Materials 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.  
• 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 currently in stock by the Supplier.
• Supplier Subtotal n – the Supplier Order Qty multiplied by the Supplier Unit Price.
• Supplier Unit Price n – cost, per unit, charged by the Supplier for the chosen part.

Example supply-chain data in a BOM.

Viewing Lifecycle State

When the Include Parameters From Vault option is enabled, at the bottom of the Bill of Materials Report Manager dialog, the LifeCycle State attribute is also made available for use in a BOM report. This enables you to see, at-a-glance, where each of the Vault-based components used in a design have reached in their life cycles, and visually verify their legitimacy - enabling you to catch, for example, components that are not for production, or have become obsolete, and make the required changes to the design, prior to embarking on what could prove a costly manufacturing spin.

Use the LifeCycle State attribute in your Static BOMs.