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Company
The Part Number Generator was developed for a printed circuit boards manufacturing company. Most of the PCBs are customised. Production process includes mounting of electronic components, which are being purchased by the company from third parties. So, the company accumulates orders from customers, sorts them and purchase the componentry from manufacturers or wholesalers.
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Problem
The problem is that customers usually provide bills of material in various file formats, and even the very notation of the components is not restricted to any common standard. On the other hand, each manufacturer of electronic components names his products using specific catalogue reference codes. The wholesalers of componentry often assign their own catalogue numbers.
All this necessitated a lot of manual work for bringing the
different component code systems into correlation with each other.
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Our Solution
The Part Number Generator, developed by Inform Link, is a componentry management system. It can import data from numerous file formats, and being integrated with scanner and OCR (optical character recognition) software, allows processing of printed materials.
Applying heuristic algorithms, the program interprets the component specification provided by the customer's bill of material, and then associates the component specification with the most similar one of the database entries (or suggests to create a new entry). The system may suggest several variants of component interpretation for manual choice.
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The system keeps the internal database of the electronic components, assigning its own reference code to each of them. This code uniquely identifies the component parameters so that identical components found among customers, manufacturers and suppliers are assigned the same code. Thus, the system creates a global system of cross-links, providing the opportunity to generate purchase orders in accordance with the manufacturer or wholesaler part list in the most quick and efficient way.
A company producing PCBs benefits as any component has only one unique part number irrespective of how many products and how many different customers use this.
All this results in:
- Reduced administration in raising orders
- Ordering based on the total requirement for a specific part
- Higher number of stock turns
- Reduced inventory
The customer gets:
- The product on time, and at the best price
- An alternative manufacturer is appropriate
These benefits can be quantified financially for any business.
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Testimonial
Manufacturing Software Solutions Ltd. about Inform-Link
We have been working with Inform-Link for the previous 1.5 years. Throughout this period our working relationship has grown and we now give Inform-Link all of our software development.
They are a very good company to work with and the quality of the work is excellent. All of the work has been completed to a high standard and all work comes complete with manuals.
Denis Hodgins, Managing Director
Manufacturing Software Solutions Ltd., UK
DJH@etb.co.uk
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