Background

Description of FirstChoice from the FIRST website: https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc/kit-of-parts

"FIRST Choice is hosted by our friends at AndyMark (for free!) and consists of an online menu of items available to FRC Teams. Its purpose is to make available a variety of valuable items that Suppliers cannot provide in volumes to support the Kickoff Kits. Instead, Teams use a limited number of credits to pick and choose the items they prefer. Because of the limited inventory, we typically run out of popular items, but we’d rather make a variety of items available than none at all."

Registered Teams to submit a Priority List, sorted by item preference. The Priority List is optional. Teams not submitting a Priority List before the deadline, will only be able to participate in the traditional “first come, first served” process starting later. AndyMark recommends having a priority list with 20 unique items using 2 times the allocated credits.

Choosing the Items

To choose what our team desires, we looked at items consumed or used previous years, items for spares, tools, and hardware. We also looked for items we might use to enhance our capabilities as a team: camera, encoders, etc. We also find another team put together a retail cost list of the FIRST Choice items. We also found what other teams were interested in by checking the ChiefDelphi forums.

The “wish list” of is created in a spreadsheet by tracking the part number, the item description, the credit cost, the max quantity per team, our desired quantity, and total credit cost. This was just a list of 40 desired items, the next step is to rank them for the bidding process.

Ranking The Items

One way to deal with ranking a large list of items is to break it down into smaller chunks. This was done by ranking the items in three rounds. Initially, items are categorized into three bins: the items we would really like to get from First Choice are put in bin “H”, useful items we'd also like to have are put in bin “M”, and items that we could use if we got them are placed in bin “L”.

Next each of the H, M, and L bins are taken individually and items within are assigned sub-rankings of A, B and C, with A being ranked higher than B and B higher than C. Also during the A, B, C ranking, an attempt is made to keep the number of items in each A, B, & C bins equal and to no more than 5 items. Finally, the items in each of the A, B, and C bins are numerically ranked 1 to 5 with 1 being highest in priority. Sorting the list by Initial Rank, Sub-rank, and Priority (which can be done in Excel) will produce a fully prioritized list.