Parts Findability in Supply Chain

Parts findability, or the ease of searching and browsing for parts in a system, plays a crucial role in any supply chain process. The longer your team spends time looking for the right parts, the more likely an unnecessary new part will be created.  This can have a snowball effect on supply chain, potentially leading to addition of a new supplier, duplicate inventory, and unnecessary overhead for the entire company.

Challenges in Modern Supply Chains

Today, companies face a multitude of challenges when trying to identify and source parts. According to the Network for Business Sustainability, modern supply chains have become so complex that many companies don’t know exactly what is happening in them due to a lack of visibility.

One of the most common pain points for supply chain teams is the lack of visibility into their total supplier population. Distributors, for example, can source from hundreds or thousands of different suppliers. Outdated and incomplete data in systems makes it challenging to audit and track each supplier. Many companies don't really know what type of parts they are buying by supplier.  In fields such as electronics manufacturing or aerospace, where multiple parts are required as part of an individual assembly, the complexity of your product can further hamper visibility into your supply chain.

With a large variety of supplier options and a lack of complete and consistent specifications, parts can be difficult to source. When it comes to negotiating direct purchases with suppliers, the lack of visibility into part quantities, lead times, and pricing across the broader population of suppliers often results in limitations around the enterprise's bargaining power. 

Another challenge that companies face when they have poor parts findability is the negative impact on operations and the bottom line. By minimizing the number of steps that your engineers need to take to find the parts they need, they will be able to complete tasks faster and more efficiently. The opposite is also true – the more difficult it is to find parts, the more time and labor will be required, eventually costing your company a lot of money across various departments.

Strategies for Improving Parts Findability and Supply Chain Efficiency

To enhance productivity across engineering and supply chain and reduce costs, here are a few strategies to consider that will improve parts findability and supply chain efficiency:

• Setting up a taxonomy structure so that all part and supplier records follow the same naming conventions and data organizing principles
• Integrating your data model with both upstream sources such as ERP and external data sources such as electronic components source data to broaden data availability
• Ensuring the most critical data attributes are populated and adhere to enterprise style guides and data quality standards
• Streamlining procurement processes and supplier relationships through workflows
• Training and empowering employees for effective searching and browsing to empower the reuse of existing parts

If you have a large amount of parts, it could be difficult to complete these tasks in-house. While some organizations try to tackle large volumes of parts through offline spreadsheets, this approach typically results in inconsistent data and poor quality, resulting in a poor parts findability framework and requiring even more rework in the future.

Luckily, there are optimal solutions in the market today, such as Design for Retrieval (DFR), a relational SaaS-based database that can help your team to:

• Establish a foundational data model that is flexible and scales with your business over time as you grow
• Stage data while it is being cleansed before sending it downstream to target production systems such as PLM and eCommerce platforms
• Identify and map important relationships between data such as parts and suppliers 
• Onboard acquisition data, matching and merging it to a corporate standard
• Put data governance in place via process flows to maintain data quality over time

📝 Contact us to learn more about how parts findability can affect your supply chain and how we can help you correct the areas of concern for your company.