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Managing Internal Summary Data

Import, manage, and ask suppliers about summary data that's important for your products and materials

Evelyn Ritter avatar
Written by Evelyn Ritter
Updated over a week ago

Summary data is information about your product material or supplier, such as plant, supplier, disclosure threshold, or product category. Within 3E Exchange, summary data is used to write reports, and stored about each record. To learn more about managing the summary data used for reporting, click here. In this article, we will focus on the summary data stored and used internally.  Returned supplier questionnaire data, such as testing completed, compliance status, or manufacturing location, is stored as summary data. Because of this, supplier questionnaires are best set-up using summary data template questions. 

Summary Data Templates

The summary data template contains the standard summary data you would like to track for each product materials, or suppliers. There are two types of summary data templates. Supplier Summary Data Template stores data about suppliers and BOM Summary Data template stores data about products or materials. Importantly, your data templates can also serve as the basis for questionnaires to suppliers. Their answers will fill their responses directly back into your data.

You can customize this summary data by editing the BOM Summary Data Template and the Supplier Summary Data Template in the "Templates" section in your navigation bar.

Summary Data Templates are organized by pages and fields. 

You can add or remove pages, and define fields on each page. Examples of these fields may be:

  • Attestation

  • Comment

  • Date

  • Dropdown Menu Selector

  • EU REACH SCIP Article Category

  • File

  • Image URL

  • Multiple Choice (only one answer)

  • Multiple Choice (multiple answers)

  • Text

  • URL

  • CSI Division

  • Multiple Text

  • Data Table

You can also require a file attachment for any field.

For more information about editing summary data click here.

Using Summary Data

When you create a questionnaire for a supplier survey, you have the option to create the questionnaire from a data template - if you do so, the data that the supplier responds with will file directly into your summary data when you accept their response.

To learn more, see Supplier Surveys and Questionnaires.

Viewing Summary Data

To view product and material summary data, open the BOM Editor and select the relevant summary data page in the left BOM menu bar.

To view supplier summary data, navigate to the desired supplier in "My Suppliers" and select "Edit Summary Data."

To view the summary data that is in your BOM fields, enable the Summary Row in your BOM. We recommend this for anyone using linked materials, calculating recycled content, or using the summary data of a product for regulatory determinations. 

Import Summary Data with a BOM Import

Some summary data can be imported with the BOM, including status, supplier, plant and tags, in extra header rows for your new product or material.

To import these values, you'll include the field in its own row and across multiple columns, if needed. Use a format such as the following:

In the example above, a separate header row is created for the first two fields we are importing. A third row contains two columns - you can use a single row with multiple columns, or multiple rows as shown above, whichever makes more sense for you.

  • Plant and Supplier will accept any values, and create a new supplier if necessary.

  • Allowed Status values may be: "In Progress", "In Process", "Process", "Progress", "Complete", or "Completed" (case-insensitive).

  • Multiple Tags may be listed as comma-delimited values, as in the example above.

  • The delimiter between the field and the values may be an equals "=" or colon ":".

Most importantly, remember to update your import Source File settings to specify the correct number of header rows:

Once completed, the new import will reflect  the imported summary fields. 

Getting Help

If you have questions about using 3E Exchange or the material covered in this help article, reach out in chat in the bottom right-hand corner or email support@3eco.com.

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