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Tips & Tricks to survive allocation
October 21, 2021
“Pain is inevitable: suffering is optional.”
We’ve got some survival tips from Greg Benoit, Director of Sales Enablement, to help you navigate this component allocation more smoothly. His smart material management advice will help you get the best use out of every single component... and alleviate some of your suffering.
Hi there, Greg Benoit from Cogiscan here.
I want to talk a little bit about this allocation or component shortage issue that’s really crippling our industry right now. Now, we at Cogiscan don’t make components, so we can’t help you that way, but we do specialize in smart material management solutions that are tailored for the electronics industry.
So, I wanted to share a couple of strategies with you that you can use to make sure that you make the absolute best use of the material that you do have, or that you can get your hands on, so that you don’t end up wasting parts and making the problem even worse.
The first strategy I want to recommend is to make sure that you have an inventory management system that tells you precisely where all of your parts are. And I mean, not only the parts in your warehouse, but just as importantly, all of the parts on your shop floor also – whether those parts are on a rack next to the line, in one of your automated storage towers, sitting in a kit somewhere, or even loaded on a feeder, either in an offline bank, or mounted on a placement machine. It’s really important that you have complete visibility into exactly how much material you already have on the factory floor. This is something that your ERP or warehouse management system will often not be able to tell you on its own, and if you don’t have this information, you risk ordering the wrong material or scheduling orders incorrectly because your systems think you have a part shortage when you actually don’t.
A second strategy is to make sure you minimize the parts that you’re wasting through scrap. And there are a couple of ways of achieving this. One way is to make sure you have a good solution for setup control on your placement machines, so that you prevent operators from loading the wrong parts in the wrong locations, which could cause scrap. Another thing you need to do is make sure you have a good real-time dashboard that shows you your scrap rate, both for the components themselves, and for your products, so that you can see right away when your scrap rates are too high, and can take action to lower your scrap and save some of this precious material.
The good news is that I just happen to know of a solution that can do all of these things for you. So if you’re interested in finding out how Cogiscan can help, please be sure to reach out to us.
I want to talk a little bit about this allocation or component shortage issue that’s really crippling our industry right now. Now, we at Cogiscan don’t make components, so we can’t help you that way, but we do specialize in smart material management solutions that are tailored for the electronics industry.
So, I wanted to share a couple of strategies with you that you can use to make sure that you make the absolute best use of the material that you do have, or that you can get your hands on, so that you don’t end up wasting parts and making the problem even worse.
The first strategy I want to recommend is to make sure that you have an inventory management system that tells you precisely where all of your parts are. And I mean, not only the parts in your warehouse, but just as importantly, all of the parts on your shop floor also – whether those parts are on a rack next to the line, in one of your automated storage towers, sitting in a kit somewhere, or even loaded on a feeder, either in an offline bank, or mounted on a placement machine. It’s really important that you have complete visibility into exactly how much material you already have on the factory floor. This is something that your ERP or warehouse management system will often not be able to tell you on its own, and if you don’t have this information, you risk ordering the wrong material or scheduling orders incorrectly because your systems think you have a part shortage when you actually don’t.
A second strategy is to make sure you minimize the parts that you’re wasting through scrap. And there are a couple of ways of achieving this. One way is to make sure you have a good solution for setup control on your placement machines, so that you prevent operators from loading the wrong parts in the wrong locations, which could cause scrap. Another thing you need to do is make sure you have a good real-time dashboard that shows you your scrap rate, both for the components themselves, and for your products, so that you can see right away when your scrap rates are too high, and can take action to lower your scrap and save some of this precious material.
The good news is that I just happen to know of a solution that can do all of these things for you. So if you’re interested in finding out how Cogiscan can help, please be sure to reach out to us.
