A Seamless Way to Lock in Your Quotes for 30 Days with DigiKey’s myLists

As organizations strive to do more with less while optimizing their internal resources, buyers of electronic components can streamline the procurement processes and free up time for themselves by creating quotes in the DigiKey platform. Once they’re logged in, clients can use the platform’s myLists consolidated list management system to create quotes and get their pricing locked in for 30 days.

Because it handles bill of materials (BOM), parts list, and quote management, myLists is an all-in-one solution for busy procurement professionals. You simply create a list of parts and myLists will instantly convert that list into a quote (by hitting the “Create Quote” button). The platform can manage up to 1,000 parts per list with pricing that’s then locked in for 30 days.

“There’s no waiting around for someone to manually create your quote; the platform does it for you automatically,” said Wendy Baldwin, senior digital product owner at DigiKey. “This can help speed up the procurement process versus having to wait for someone to manually respond to your request for quote (RFQ).”

A Tool that Helps Manage Through Uncertainty

Having an instant quote tool for electronic components is especially beneficial during periods of fluctuating prices and extended lead times. If your company’s procurement process is lengthy, having pricing locked in for 30 days helps minimize the potential for price discrepancies when it comes time to issue a purchase order (PO).

“If you don’t create a quote, the pricing could change and impact your procurement process or even force you to start it all over again from scratch,” said Baldwin. Even if the 30-day lock-in period expires before your PO is issued, you can use myLists to reactivate the quote, duplicate it, resubmit it, and get a new quote—all in the platform.

Once a PO is issued, the buyer goes back to myLists, selects the whole quote or individual parts, clicks “Add to Cart” and places the order. As registered users of the DigiKey platform, these users can leverage their historical orders to pre-populate addresses and other information (versus having to key it all back in again).

It’s a “Living List”

Using myLists, procurement professionals can also share the quote data with co-workers who may need access to that information. And if any of the part numbers happen to be obsolete or unavailable at order time, it’s very easy to go back in, modify the list and then use it to build a new, updated quote.

“You can work with a ‘living list’ versus having to continually go back into your ordering platform, create your parts lists and build them all over again,” said Baldwin. “And because it’s a one-to-many relationship, you can have a single list aligned with as many quotes as you need.”

An All-in-One, Instant Experience

Using myLists to create quotes helps streamline the end-to-end procurement process and provides a level of visibility that buyers can refer back to as orders make their way through the supply chain. This is a major improvement over simply emailing an order to a vendor and waiting for someone to acknowledge and enter that order into the system.

As several customers pointed out in a recent DigiKey Customer Insights survey, myLists also provides automated guidance for when incorrect part numbers, quantities, or other information is entered into the platform. “It helps guide the buyers by making suggestions when their lists include duplicates, missing digits, or other issues,” Baldwin explained.

“Our customers have also told us that they like being able to easily navigate between their parts lists and the platform’s quoting feature,” she continued.  “If both an engineer and buyer are working on parts lists for the same project, for example, those lists are automatically merged into a unified list. It’s truly an all-in-one, instant experience for all team members.”