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A material’s supplier is the company you source it from. It drives inbound transport (A2 and A4) and lets Variable attribute emissions per supplier, so it’s worth filling in — but setting it one item at a time, in each item’s settings, is slow work once you have a few hundred materials. Assign supplier does it in bulk. Select items in your inventory, pick a supplier, and Variable points all of them at that company in one action.

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Running it

1

Select the items

In Inventory → Elements, tick the items you want. The bulk toolbar slides in from the bottom with the selection count and its actions.
2

Choose Assign supplier

Pick Assign supplier from the toolbar. A dialog opens with a supplier picker — search your existing suppliers, or create a new one from the same field.
3

Decide what happens to items that already have a supplier

Leave Overwrite existing suppliers off to fill in only the items that are missing one, or tick it to re-point every selected item. See the two modes below.
4

Check the counts and confirm

The dialog shows how many items will be assigned and how many will be skipped before you commit. The confirm button repeats the number — “Assign to 42 items” — so you always know the size of the write.

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The two modes

The dialog uses the same idea as the import match mode: fill in what’s missing, or let your new value win.
Fill-missing is the default on purpose: it’s the safe pass. Run it across your whole inventory as often as you like — it never changes a supplier you’ve already recorded, and the skipped count tells you how many items it deliberately left alone.

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Overwriting, and why materials are supplier-specific

In Variable a material is tied to a specific supplier, because the same substance from two suppliers can carry very different emissions — different processes, energy mixes, and geography. So changing a material’s supplier is normally not how you switch sourcing: to source low-alloyed steel from a new mill, create a new material for that mill and swap it into the bill of materials, keeping each supplier’s footprint honest and your history intact. That makes Overwrite existing a correction, not a sourcing change. Reach for it when the supplier on record is simply wrong or was recorded against a placeholder company — you’re fixing the label on a material that always came from this supplier.
Supplier feeds A2/A4 transport and per-supplier attribution, so an overwrite can move impact results across every selected item at once. Each change is recorded in the item’s history, but there’s no one-click undo for a bulk assignment — correcting one means assigning the right supplier again. Check the counts before you confirm.
This is also the one place the supplier link changes in bulk. Data import never touches relationships, so re-importing a file won’t move a material to a different supplier no matter which match mode you choose.

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What can and can’t be assigned

Bulk assignment writes to drafts only, and only to items your account owns.
  • An item in a Locked or Verified state is reported back as “is not in draft state” and left unchanged. To edit it, create a new draft version — see Product and material versioning.
  • The supplier you pick has to be a company your account can use. Creating one from the picker takes care of that for you.

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Setting a supplier on one item

The bulk action is a shortcut for a field that lives on every item. Open the item, click the gear icon in the top right, and find the Product / part selector — it decides whether there’s a supplier to set at all.
  • Product means your company makes it, so there’s no supplier to name. This is the made in-house case that fill-missing treats as missing.
  • Part means you purchase it, or manufacture it in-house for your own use. The Supplier picker sits beside the selector — search your suppliers or create one from the field, the same as in the bulk dialog.
  • On a dataset the selector reads My company / Supplier instead, with the same effect.
You can also set the supplier while creating an Element, in the new-Element dialog. Transport items carry no supplier of their own. A transport input takes the supplier of the material it moves, and a transport mode names the organization that published its dataset rather than a company you source from.