Cofactr offers unique insights through proprietary data in a couple distinct ways for our customers. The main ways you'll see this are through our Data Accuracy Score, Part Quality Verification and categories of stock
Data Accuracy or "Accuracy": There are a lot of distributors in the world and many of them provide wonderful updated data on the parts that they have available for purchase. Some, unfortunately, do not. Because Cofactr purchases from many distributors at a high frequency, we can show a reliable grade of how accurate the data for a distributor is. We represent this evaluation as a letter grade of A+ through F.
A lot of considerations go into this grade such as representation of overall stock, minimum order quantities, price breaks at different volumes, etc. Obviously, having to order 20 of a part instead of 10 is a flaw in the data, but it pales in comparison to a distributor who lists 2,000 of a hard to find part when their stock is, in fact, zero. Those are the data inaccuracies that can significantly disrupt a process for our customers. These discrepancies in data accuracy are weighted, calculated, and then shown to you as the easily digestible letter grade.
Part Quality Verification or "Quality": When you're buying parts the most important thing is that you get the parts, as described, that you bought: No fake parts, no counterfeits, no broken parts, etc. That is where 'Quality' comes in.
Any distributor who consistently provides parts that are genuine, quality, new parts shows a check mark in the Quality column of listed distributors.
That doesn't mean that a distributor without a check is a bad distributor. A distributor we haven't worked with much won't have a check because we don't know if their parts are quality. If Cofactr receives a part from a distributer that has any issue the distributer loses its Quality check. We all know that the realities of electronics supply chain sometimes necessitates a purchase from a less well-known or gray market channel. (We protect against counterfeit parts through anti-counterfeiting checks and Refund Guarantee you can learn about HERE) Cofactr has a thorough process that includes historical purchase patterns, scheduled test purchases from distributors, and other factors that assure that changes in distributor behavior is reflected in the Cofactr platform.
Our goal with Quality is to provide you insight into the most trusted and reliable avenues of parts procurement and to make sure that risks are mitigated when supply chain challenges rear their head.
Here is an example of how Accuracy and Quality appear in the platform: