BOMSCRUBBING
BOMManageMenT a chaLLenge
Manually scrubbing a BOMis time-consuming and tedious. Here’s how one EMS company tackled—and solved—the problem
As an electronicsmanufacturing services (EMS) provider,Microboard Processing (MPI)manufactures products on behalf of its customers and deals with large numbers of electronic components and customer provided bills-of-materials (BOMs) on a daily basis.
“Our customers provide us with a variety of BOMs in various
formats and levels of completeness. It has been an ongoing challenge to clean and scrub incomplete part numbers and mismatched suppliers for hundreds of line items in any given BOM,” says Jeffrey Cholin, senior component engineer atMPI. “Incomplete part numbers impede our ability to provide quotes to customers in a timelymanner as we do not have enough accurate component information to estimate costs, further, if we have an incomplete part number in ourMRP systemit forces our buyers to resolve them with the vendor or causes the parts to be held in receiving if the vendor “interprets” what the number should be.”
Component engineers atMPImanually corrected hundreds of
records in customer BOMs and sought additional component data one by one before quoting customers or starting the purchasing process. “Manually scrubbing BOMs is a tedious and inefficient process,” Cholin says. “We needed a fast, automated approach to scrubbing BOMs that also gave us deep component and sourcing data. We were also in a reactive paradigmwith respect to component obsolescence; not an acceptable situation.”
The solution MPI turned to SiliconExpert to lower the number ofman-hours it required to normalise its customer’s BOMs. SiliconExpert’s BOM manager tool now allows the engineering teamatMPI to quickly scrub and source component data. “The scrubbing process for the average size BOMused to take us several hours to complete.We’re now able to scrub and normalise the BOMs to our formats in a matter ofminutes,” adds Cholin. “Because of clean part numbers, we were also able to reduce the amount of parts that get placed on hold in receiving due to incomplete information available.We now do fewer audits and were able to reduce the hold rate by half. Complete and correct part numbers significantly reduces our part management overheads.”
SiliconExpert also flags obsolete parts and those that are not
recommended for new design (NRND) for BOMs that are uploaded. By providing an accurate and real-time lifecycle status of parts in the BOMs,MPI is now able to identify problemcomponents earlier giving their customersmore time to respond.
16 | July 2010 Cross reference
reports also allow MPI to seek alternate parts thatmatch form-fit-function giving the company the option to lower lead times and component sourcing costs. “The parametric search facility has come in handy dozens of times to find an equivalent component inminutes when we were faced with a shortage, allowing us to recommend solutions to customers rather than hand themdelays. In one specific case, we found an alternate component using the parametric search when faced with stretching delivery dates. Our customer approved the alternate and we were able to lower the cost of the assembly significantly for them,” says Cholin. “Also, the inventory report allows us to focus on sending POs to vendors we know have the parts rather than using the buyer’s time to poll availability.”
BOM manager provides instantaneous reports on inventory and other BOM metrics
“Finally, the risk analysis tool has allowed us toworkmore
proactivelywith our customers tomanage their BOM’s as component availability changes. We are ametrics driven company, sowe focus on providing our customerswith accurate information,” Cholin adds.
The Result • Faster quotes to customers yielding new business opportunities: By switching to SiliconExpert’s BOMManager,MPI has significantly reduced its time to clean and scrub customer BOMs. This, in turn, allowsMPI to turn around quotes to customers with greater confidence and in a significantly smaller time frame than before.
• Lowered component costs result in higher return on investment: By using SiliconExpert’s Lifecycle & Cross Reference features,MPI is able tomitigate the effects of upcoming obsolescence events and source viable alternates helping it reduce purchasing costs.
• Reducedman-hours increase productivity and control:
MPI’s component engineers no longer spend hours and days scrubbing and normalising tedious BOMs. SiliconExpert’s BOM Manager cleans BOMs automatically and populates deep parametric data on components, allowingMPI to increase efficiency and improve its time-to-market.
www.microboard.com www.electronics-sourcing.eu
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