Purchasing

Purchasing is an essential aspect of managing electronic parts inventory. PartsBox provides features to streamline the purchasing process, making it easier to manage orders and create purchase lists for multiple projects.

Orders

When adding stock for parts in PartsBox, you can associate the added stock with an existing order or create a new order on the fly. This allows PartsBox to maintain information about the source of the parts. In plans with lot control enabled, the order information will be connected to a specific lot. In plans without lot control, the order information will be associated with the part itself.

Each order in PartsBox is assigned a unique ID Anything™ code. These codes can be printed and attached to invoices, enabling quick retrieval of order data in the future.

Purchase Lists

While many BOM (Bill of Materials) tools focus on managing a single project or BOM, real-life scenarios often involve planning the production of multiple devices simultaneously. These devices may share common parts, making it challenging to determine the exact purchasing requirements, especially when considering existing stock levels.

The presence of meta-parts (part alternates) adds another layer of complexity to the purchasing process. Until the moment of ordering, it is desirable to maintain flexibility in choosing a specific MPN (Manufacturer Part Number) for each part.

PartsBox simplifies the purchasing process by providing the following features:

1. Project Cart: Add your projects/BOMs to a project cart, specifying the quantities you plan to build, as if you were shopping for your projects.
2. Create Purchase List: Click the "Create Purchase List" button to combine the projects in the cart and generate a consolidated list of parts required for all the builds.
3. Review and Customize: In the purchase list, you can view online offers, add your own offers, and select specific alternates and offers for each part. This allows you to make informed decisions based on pricing, availability, and preferred suppliers.
4. Per-Distributor Splitting: When you are ready to proceed with the purchase, PartsBox will automatically split the purchase list per distributor. This provides a clear overview of what needs to be ordered from each distributor, streamlining the ordering process.

By leveraging these features in PartsBox, you can efficiently manage the purchasing process for multiple projects, taking into account existing inventory, meta-parts, and supplier preferences. This saves time, reduces errors, and ensures that you have the necessary parts to complete your builds.

Local Source Filtering

When using a purchase list with the "Use local stock first" option enabled, PartsBox considers your existing inventory before recommending purchases. In some scenarios, you may want to exclude certain stock from being considered. For example:

• Contract manufacturers (CM/EMS) often store client-consigned parts alongside their own inventory. When creating purchase lists for a specific client, only that client's parts should be considered as available local stock.
• Companies with multiple storage areas may want to exclude parts from certain locations (e.g., parts reserved for other projects, parts in quarantine, or parts awaiting quality inspection).

The Local source filtering option in purchase lists allows you to specify which stock should be considered when calculating purchase requirements. You can filter based on:

• Storage location attributes (name, tags)
• Part attributes (name, tags, manufacturer, MPN)
• Lot attributes (name, tags, expiration status)
• Stock attributes (comments, tags)

This filtering works the same way as build source filtering in the Advanced Build System, ensuring consistency between your builds and purchase planning. When you set up source filters in a purchase list, only stock matching those filters will be considered as available inventory — everything else will be treated as if it doesn't exist, resulting in purchase recommendations for the full required quantities.

Example: Contract Manufacturer Setup

A contract manufacturer might organize their storage with prefixes like "CLIENT-A-", "CLIENT-B-", and "MTE-" (for their own parts). When creating a purchase list for Client A's project:

1. Open the purchase list
2. In the "Local source filtering" section, add a filter for storage locations where the name starts with "CLIENT-A-" or "MTE-"
3. The purchase list will now only consider parts from those locations as available stock

This ensures that parts consigned by other clients won't accidentally be allocated to Client A's build.