The single biggest time-sink in industrial-electrical procurement is the bill of materials (BOM). A 500-line panel-build BOM takes a procurement team a full day to clear — phoning each supplier, checking stock line-by-line, transcribing manufacturer part numbers, chasing equivalents for whatever is out of stock. EPFINDER’s new BOM-upload + AI-matching feature does the whole job in under a minute.
What you can upload
The BOM uploader accepts any format your team already produces:
- CSV / Excel — the most common case. Any column structure is accepted; the AI infers which columns hold part numbers, descriptions, quantities, and references.
- PDF — typed or scanned. Tables are extracted automatically; multi-page documents are aggregated.
- Photo / scanned drawing — a snap of a hand-written BOM, a printed cut-sheet, or a CAD-export image. The same OCR pipeline that powers image-based product search reads the lines.
- Plain text — paste a list straight from an email.
What you get back
For every line of your BOM, EPFINDER returns:
- In-stock match — if the exact part is on our shelf, you see the SKU, unit price, and stock count.
- Equal-or-higher alternative — if we don’t have the exact part, the system proposes a same-family, higher-rated stock alternative. The rule is universal across current, power, breaking-capacity, cross-section, and storage capacity. A 25 A line never gets answered with a 20 A part.
- Lead-time line — for items that aren’t stock and have no equivalent we offer, you see a manufacturer-direct lead-time estimate (typically 1–6 weeks depending on origin).
- Project-quantity pricing — bulk pricing is applied automatically based on the line quantity.
- Compliance flags — items written into DEWA, ADDC, SEWA, FEWA, or Etihad WE specifications are flagged with their approval status.
The interactive selection step
You don’t have to accept every match blindly. Each line has a radio-button selector — pick the proposed match, pick an alternative, or kick the line back to a sales engineer for manual sourcing. When you are done, three buttons at the bottom: Quote, Add to Cart, or Email Sales. Each one captures the lead in our CRM and routes it to the right next step.
What this changes for a panel-build team
The Friday-afternoon “I need a delivery price on this BOM by Monday” enquiry — historically a half-day exercise — is now a one-upload exercise. Procurement teams can run several scenarios (cheapest in-stock, fastest delivery, all-ABB consolidation) without retyping anything. Sales engineers spend their time on the genuinely hard lines instead of the 90% of straightforward matches.
Try it now
Drag a BOM file into the EP-AI chat widget or visit the BOM-upload page. Any format works. We respond within one business hour for project enquiries; instant for stock-availability checks.
