Building a price compression excel sheet. HELP! HELP! HELP!

[jdjames4]

I'm looking for some help in building a price compression excel sheet. I recently accepted a job as a purchasing agent for a service tech company. We provide service to gas station pumps and POS (point of sale systems) at gas stations. We have multiple vendors and I would like to centralize all our different vendors to one excel spreadsheet. Most if not all our vendors send an excel spreadsheet with their pricing. I would like to make a master tab with all the part numbers and descriptions and the different prices from each of our vendors. Many of the vendors have different part numbers for parts that would be consider the same. I would like for the master tab to be able to distinguish between the different vendors and be able to recognize and easily display which vendor and vendor part number is the cheapest. Then I would like to make individual tabs of each individual company. I would like the individual tab of each company to give a brief description of the company with what type products they offer their strengths and weaknesses and the discounts they offer. I also would like to include lead time for each product on the master tab and the individual tab of each company. I'm trying to make a great impression and looking for some great help. I would like to be able to update the prices easy and be able to use the spreadsheet going forward for years to come I'm decedent in excel but never really built a spreadsheet of this magnitude. I'm looking for people to jump and add to the spreadsheet give advice and add some ingenuity and creativity to really create a spreadsheet that will help the company in purchasing.

 

[Trevor_S]

I think you need to start with some careful planning - particularly if this is to have long-term use.

For example, what "fields" do you need - e.g. vendor name, their part number, your part number, and so on. Then how to group them into tables - you may find that some fields are specific to a supplier "header" (e.g. their contact details, the brief description of them, etc.), while other fields will be more specific to an individual part. So perhaps have a table for each. This will avoid repetition, and make it easier to update. If suppliers provide information in a consistent format, it may be possible to automate updates using macros.

What I would advise against is the "one tab per supplier" idea. This can quickly get out of control as the number of suppliers increases. Instead have one tab which is more like a form in a user friendly format - perhaps a drop down at the top to select the supplier, with the information relevant to the selected supplier pulled in from the table(s) by lookup formulae or macros.

Hope that's given you some ideas to start with. If its any help, work on your field list and post them here, and I'll put something together when I get chance.