Manufacturing Efficiency: Duplicate parts
Designers spend up to 80%[1] of their time designing parts from scratch when identical or near-identical duplicates already exist. Not only does this waste an incredible amount of design time—it ultimately severely impacts other areas of manufacturing efficiency through the needless increase in SKU numbers and complexity.
Each additional SKU is an opportunity for delays and costs. Complexity is the ultimate enemy of manufacturing efficiency.
Complexity increases:
- Time to market
- Hard costs
- Soft costs
Lowering the number of parts that your organization needs in stock potentially means savings in:
- Design
- Quality Control
- Production
- Storage
- Distribution
- Manufacturing
- After Sales and Service
An LMI study** performed for the U.S. Department of Defense estimates that each new part SKU added to inventory costs $27,500 on average.
Breaking down the costs of duplicate parts
Beyond design time, adding an unnecessary part into your global supply chain creates many costs:
Production and materials cost of the duplicate parts
Depending upon the quantity needed, the material cost and the complexity of manufacture, this could be a minor or massive cost.
Inventory and storage costs
As part numbers rise into the tens and hundreds of thousands of individual parts, the complexity of tracking and storing these parts, where and when they are needed, increases exponentially.
The global orchestration of parts, delivery and accurate inventory tracking means that the addition of a dozen duplicate parts into the design of a complex product could be the difference between making shipping deadlines — and missing them.
Production and logistical complications
Every additional duplicate part is one more SKU. One more SKU may need to be manufactured in one part of the world and shipped and tracked to manufacturing centers elsewhere.
Quality control costs
Every new part number is one more quality check, one more audit box, one more point of potential failure.
How do you decrease duplicate parts and increase manufacturing efficiency?
We’re glad you asked. It starts with designers voluntarily searching and reusing part designs. To make this seemingly simple step a reality, all of your various design and storage silos need to be connected to a single easy-to-use interface. This solution requires the following characteristics in order to be effective:
- Searches can be based on shape, similarity to another part, materials, features, holes, bevels or virtually any characteristics or metadata.
- Designs should show up regardless of the department, region, or CAD program that originally designed the files.
- Results should be quickly filtered down to show only viable candidates.
- Documentation, manufacturing build of materials (BOM), and other associated data must also be available.
We wrote the book on increasing Manufacturing Efficiency and Eliminating Duplicate parts.
Download our 10-page booklet on eliminating duplicate parts and increasing manufacturing efficiency:
— Save Design Time
— Simplify Global Supply Chains
— Calculate ROI on Eliminating duplicate parts
Or just ask us about our software solution
EXALEAD OnePart is the solution. It’s easy and comprehensive enough that engineers and designers will quickly embrace it. The resulting ROI on eliminating duplicate parts is astonishing — give us a call at (630) 451-9033, or contact us online, and we will walk you through how to quantify the benefits for your organization.
[1] Arthur D. Little Study
