How do I buy a Bill of Materials (BOM)?

Finding optimized sourcing for a BOM.

Phillip Gulley avatar
Written by Phillip Gulley
Updated over a week ago

You can purchase an entire Bill of Materials (BOM) in the quantity you need through Cofactr by navigating to the BOM app and then selecting a BOM. To purchase navigate to the tab called "Purchasing". It should look something like this:

You'll see a number of options such as Quantity of BOM, Maximum Lead time, the option to add overages and subtract existing inventory from your sourcing, and the ability to limit sourcing options to certain suppliers including specific supplier lists, authorized or compliant suppliers. You can learn more about the Overages, Subtracting Inventory, and distributor filtering in Purchasing Shopping Lists HERE.

Once you have selected your sourcing preferences you can click "Calculate Sourcing Options" which will initiate generating your optimized sourcing options.

This may take a minute or two as Cofactr is searching through all of our distributors for every possible combination of sourcing and pricing as well as leveraging the purchase of parts from distributors in different combinations to find you the best prices not just on individual parts cut considering shipping, distributor fees, and any customs fees. Cofactr's optimization finds you the best possible landed cost across every part.

Once Cofactr find the best possible sourcing based on your preferences you'll see a screen like this:

This is a quick summery of the availability of the parts you're looking to source including the parts that you have in inventory, the parts that are buyable, the parts which need to be quoted, any parts that are maybe sourceable (meaning the data provided by those distributors needs to be verified with the distributor before Cofactr can confidently say the part is available) and how many parts are "Need to find" meaning a sourcing request will have to be submitted or you may want to consider reaching out to your trusted network of brokers.

When you create a sourcing request through Cofactr you are initiating Cofactr to act as a broker on your behalf. What makes us unique is that the source and cost of the parts will be entirely transparent. Cofactr then adds on Refund Guarantee and Anti-Counterfeiting processes to dramatically minimize the risk to you. You can read more about Cofactr's Refund Guarantee and Anti-Counterfeiting HERE.

You can now select your preferred lead time and price for the total parts necessary. The number of options is dependent on suppliers who provide the part as buyable and their lead times. This will include all the parts which are immediately buyable. When you click on your preferred option it will expand giving you a summary of how many parts are coming from what distributors and the amount spent with each distributor.

You can then select your preferred lead time and price and then initiate the order by clicking "Create Order".

You can also buy individual parts by clicking the Shopping Cart icon to the right of any single line or create a New Sourcing Request (you can read more about New Sourcing requests HERE) from this view by clicking on the 'paper airplane' icon on the right of the line if the parts are listed as "NEED TO FIND" or "QUOTABLE".

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