The first step to setting up your 3E Exchange account is to locate your product and material chemical composition data internally so that it can be imported into the 3E Exchange application. BOM or Bill of Material data is often comprised of data such as weight data (either as a percentage of the product or in units), chemical registry numbers (or EC numbers), levels of hierarchy, supplier information, and many more.

Do you have Excel spreadsheets that encompass this data or do you have SDS (safety data sheet) documents that represent material composition for your product?

SDS Import

Though SDS documents only show hazardous chemicals within your product and sometimes only comprise a small percentage of your product or material, they are a great starting point. 3E Exchange even allows users to scan their SDS documents into the system to be machine translated and stored as a material record in your library. If you want to scan SDS documents into your library, you can utilize either our bulk SDS import option or our single SDS import option for a material or a product.

Scanning an SDS into the system will not turn your SDS Ingredient data into a BOM automatically. However, our AI-based functionality allows you to add the ingredient data to the BOM by scraping the chemical composition and weight data from the SDS. It will also save a record of the SDS within the new product or material.

To do so, you have to navigate to the "Safety Data Sheet" summary data page on the menu to access the SDSs related to that record and then click on "Import to BOM" under Section 3 of the SDS fields:

This will add the Ingredient data from the selected SDS to your Product or Material BOM view:

You can decide which SDS to use for filling in the BOM ingredient data in case you have uploaded more than 1 SDS for a Product or a Material.

Spreadsheet Import

If you have spreadsheet data (usually set up in columns using hierarchy or repeated rows to represent hierarchy), you can use our standard templates for a single material, a single product, a single material, or a material library.

Each option will provide you with a template. The Excel template will download and you will have tabs with instruction and examples built into the template for ease of use. A template will look something like this...

The importing page will look similar to this. You will have a workflow at the top of the screen that will walk you through the process. You can see that step 1 includes downloading your template and then step 2 will be putting the 4 unique identifiers for your product/material into the system. These are important because 3E Exchange will only allow you to have 1 unique record and it uses these 4 fields to distinguish one record from another. It also uses these 4 fields to match the correct data with the correct material when importing down the road using existing data. Step 3 will be attaching that template you filled out and step 4 will be advanced options.

Advanced options can be set so that your future imports will follow the same structure without you having to re select options here (see highlight below).

Advanced options look like those above. Make sure your Autocalculations are always turned on so that 3E Exchange can work its magic and make your life easier! Extracting and linking materials is important because it allows you to generate materials from the level 1 hierarchy within your product. You do not have to utilize this feature but it will make upkeeping your product library much more fluent moving forward. Click here to learn more about linked materials.

If you are using a 3E Exchange template, you will get the option to skip over the mapping step and will get this notification:

If you have to map your import, you will be able to select the appropriate column in your BOM and then map it to the appropriate column in 3E Exchange. You can also check the box below stating "each row represents multiple levels in the BOM hierarchy" if your data is set up more conducive to this structure as opposed to having visible numbers to represent hierarchy. The mapping page will look similar to this:

When you are ready, go ahead and press SAVE & VIEW to kick off your import. You can navigate away from this page as the import is processing and you will get a notification via email when it is complete. When your import is complete, it will provide you with a list of products and materials that were generated or updated and you can click on them from these links or from your library.

Happy importing! Feel free to reach out to our team for information about custom import options and API capabilities.

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.