Overview
Upload Tools enables you to upload, normalize, analyze and securely share material data including excess inventory, BOMs, shortages, and purchase requisitions with your customers and suppliers.1. Upload File
To upload your material availability (e.g.Excess, Shortages, BOMs, Purchase Requisitions):
- Click Create Listing (on the Listings page or Home) and open the Upload list tab.
- Select Supply or Demand depending on the type of information you want to share (e.g., excess lists would be supply, shortages and cost savings would be demand).
- Click or drop a file in
.xlsxor.csvformat — or switch to Paste mode to paste a table directly.
Suggested Fields
Prepare your files using these suggested fields to improve mapping accuracy.Mandatory Fields
- Material No: In Electronics, Manufacturer Part Number (MPN) - the material number from the manufacturer
- Manufacturer: Material manufacturer name - use standard industry names, Seminode can also standardize
- Unit Price: Price per individual part - your target buying or selling price
- Qty: Total quantity you are looking to purchase or sell
Optional Fields
- Internal No: Internal Part Number (IPN) - an internal part number used by you or a partner
- Lead Time: Time required to fulfill and ship the order once confirmed (for supply lists)
- Required Date: When you need the material delivered (for demand lists)
- Date Code: Manufacturing date code - format varies by manufacturer (YYWW, YYMMDD, etc.)
- Currency: Price currency (USD, EUR, GBP, etc.) - defaults to USD if not specified
2. Map Columns
After uploading your file, Seminode automatically detects the headers in your spreadsheet and displays them above the data table. Each column will show a dropdown menu where you can map your original headers to Seminode’s standardized fields. Why it matters: Proper column mapping ensures that even if different teams or suppliers use different naming conventions (e.g., “Qty” vs. “Quantity,” “Mfr” vs. “Manufacturer”), Seminode will normalize the data so it can be cleansed, analyzed, and compared consistently.Dedup Keys
On each mapped column header, click the key toggle to mark that column as a dedup key. Dedup keys define what makes a row unique — for example, Material No, or Internal No combined with Site Code. When you Clean, rows that share the same values across all your dedup keys are collapsed into one. Deduplication is off by default: if you leave every key unset, every row is kept.Deduplication is a tool for supply lists, where the same part appearing twice usually is the same part. On the demand side, Seminode deliberately does not collapse rows — two requirements for the same part are still two requirements, each with its own quantity, date, and owner, and merging them would understate what you need to buy.
Private Columns
Mark any column as private using the lock toggle on its header. Private columns are cleansed and kept with your data for internal matching, but are never included when you publish to partners — only public fields are distributed. Nothing is private by default. The columns preselected on a new upload come from Settings → Listings → Default Private Columns , which is empty until someone configures it. Until then, every upload starts with no private columns marked. Once you’ve marked the columns you want, click Save as default to persist that selection for your whole team. Every future upload will preselect those columns wherever they appear in the file — individual uploaders can still toggle them per upload. See Public & Private Fields for the full model.3. Clean & Normalize Data
The cleaning tool standardizes your material data — correcting inconsistent formatting, collapsing duplicates, and flagging invalid values. Once your required columns are mapped, click Clean . This opens the Clean Options modal, where you choose what happens to your file. Nothing in this list runs unless you turn it on.
Deduplication runs alongside these, using the dedup keys you set during mapping.
Choose your options and click Clean. When you’re done, click Cancel to go back and adjust your mapping instead.
Reconciling Row Counts
Cleaning can change how many rows you end up with, in both directions, and knowing which direction is expected saves a lot of second-guessing.- Fewer rows — deduplication collapsed rows sharing your dedup keys. The results header tells you how many duplicates were removed and from what starting count. A drop you can’t account for is worth investigating.
- More rows — this is normal and usually correct. If your source file carries a list of approved manufacturers per part (multiple manufacturer and part-number columns on one line, or several manufacturers in a single cell), each part-manufacturer pair is split into its own row so it can be quoted independently. One line covering three approved manufacturers becomes three rows.
Reconcile your counts after cleansing, but investigate drops, not growth. Growth almost always means approved-manufacturer expansion did its job; an unexplained drop means your dedup keys are broader than you intended.
4. Review & Analyze
After cleansing, your file displays in a structured table with standardized part numbers, manufacturers, and pricing.- Suspicious or invalid part numbers are flagged in yellow automatically.
- Verify against your original file — Seminode preserves your original headers and values, so you can confirm every normalization (manufacturer, part number, currency) before anything is published.
Review Manufacturers
Open Manufacturers from the actions menu to see how each uploaded manufacturer string resolved against the manufacturer registry. Each row shows the uploaded string and what it resolves to — either a matched manufacturer or a New manufacturer badge. Repoint any match that looks wrong, or reset it to create a new manufacturer instead. Changes save as you make them. This step is optional; publishing without it uses the matches shown.Edit Rows
Choose Edit Rows from the actions menu to correct values in place. While editing you can also mark rows for removal — a marked row turns red with an undo control, and nothing is applied until you click Save Changes. Discard abandons the whole batch of edits.Analyze
Analyze opens a List Analysis view with Overview, By Manufacturer, and By Material tabs:- Total lines and total material value
- Top materials by value
- Top manufacturers by value
- An AI-written summary of what’s in the list
5. Publish to Nodes
Only partners with permission to access the selected node will see the data, ensuring secure and targeted distribution. See Nodes for more information on node creation and permissions. When the list is ready, click Publish :- Choose where to publish your listings — select one or more destination nodes. The nodes shown come from your Network posting connections.
- Click Publish to confirm.
Skipping the File: Pasting Parts Directly
For a handful of parts, a full upload is more ceremony than the job needs. The New parts tab of the Create Listing modal gives you a small grid — MPN, Manufacturer, Qty, Target price — that you can type or paste into, with no mapping and no cleaning step. Lines go straight to your RFQ basket. Pasting is the fast path. Copy a block of cells from a spreadsheet or an email and paste anywhere in the grid:- Each line becomes a row. Blank lines are ignored, and pasted rows are added to whatever is already in the grid rather than replacing it.
- Tab- or comma-separated cells fill the columns in order — MPN, Manufacturer, Qty, Target price. A copied spreadsheet range works as-is.
- A line with no separators becomes an MPN. Paste a bare column of part numbers and you get one row each, ready for you to fill in the rest.
- Values that aren’t numbers are left blank in the Qty and Target price columns rather than being forced in, so a stray
TBDorcallwon’t corrupt your quantities. - Anything unparseable lands in the MPN column, editable. Nothing is silently dropped — rows needing attention are highlighted so you can fix them in place.