Quoting
Quoting helps you on estimating purchasing and production costs, by assigning a cost to every item in a BOM or purchase list. BOMIST achieves this by integrating with several supplier and distributor APIs which give it access to real-time pricing and availability for all your outsourced components. If needed, you can also create custom suppliers and add your own quotations.
By default the app is integrated with the Nexar API (formerly Octopart), which means you can leverage it without any additional cost for you. On top of that, you can also use third-party APIs provided by some online distributors (Mouser, DigiKey, Farnell, TME, etc).
Third-party APIs
Currently supported third-party APIs include:
- DigiKey
- Mouser
- Element14 (Farnell and Newark)
- TME
- Future Electronics
- (...more to be expected).
Contrary to the Nexar API, you'll need to get your own API credentials for each third-party API you might want to use, from the corresponding distributor's website. An advantage of using these third-party APIs, is that now the app will be able to fetch any custom pricing you might have on these distributors. Using a distributor's own API should also mean you have the most accurate pricing possible, straight from the distributor itself.
You can enter your third-party API credentials through Settings - Workspace - Quotes.
Preferred suppliers can be defined also in Settings - Workspace - Quotes and the app will try to find quotes through them, in the same order provided and by picking the cheapest quotes given the quantity required. You can also opt to only show quotes for preferred suppliers, even if the app would be able to find quotes from other suppliers.
Even though quoting is available on all plans, prices are only visible on professional plans. This means you can still assign quotes in a purchase list and see parts availability on online suppliers but won't be able to estimate costs.
Auto-assigning quotes
To make it as easy and quick as possible, you can simply select all the rows on a BOM or purchase list and ask the app to find quotes for all of them. This is available on the table at Products - BOM - Pricing & Availability and also on Purchasing - Purchase Lists.
You might not find valid quotes for everything on your BOM or purchase list but it should provide you with a good starting point. The app will filter out any quotes that won't match your target quantities (available stock on the supplier, minimum order quantity, etc).
Custom suppliers & quotes
In case the app can't find any quotes for your parts, through the APIs the app integrates with, you can still add your own. In this case, you can add any new supplier and custom quotes, or add custom quotes for online suppliers that somehow don't show up through the API. You do this through the Suppliers tab.