Parts inventory system suggestions?

Make sure they don't just let it all sit around in boxes. You'll likely need a nitrogen cabinet, considering that stuff can have leadtimes in excess of a year now.

What I saw used a lot was a four+four numbering system with a dash in the middle which harks back to the old HP days I think. The first four identify the part category (resistor, capacitor, transistor, standoff, bolt, glue, et cetera). The 2nd four identifies the particular value (20k, 0.1uF, MMBT3904 ...). Each 4+4 number can have multiple brands for the same value but it must be ECO released, so that you don't mix things into older designs that won't work there. Then it all goes into a large database.

You could also just buy a system but I don't know any of the smaller ones myself:

Seems to work :-)

There's Open Source for nearly everything these days:

Reviews:

It's mainly for Linux though. That's right up Phil's alley, and also mine now. However, his customer might be running Windows.

Sounds like they're pretty firm about not supporting Windows too. They must have gotten fed up with all the vulnerabilities and hacking.

Haven't tried any. We use a Erp.

But bomist looks promising.

Other wise an access database would suffice.

Cheers

MAX, which we wrote ourselves. We couldn't find any standard software that understood our needs.

It handles BOMs and production allocations and such too.

One problem that all the commercial software had was the assumption that something like 2N7000 is a good name for a stockable part.

We assign a 7-digit stock number to a part, which is what we call out on a schematic and on a BOM. OnSemi 2N7000 might be one acceptable thing to purchase to go in the 205-2001 bin, but there could be others.

Software that we evaluated didn't seem to understand this.

Given a correct schematic with MAX numbers on the parts, PADS can generate a BOM in our format. We have other programs that cross-check the stock numbers on a BOM against values and such. We currenty have

Simon wrote something like that for us, which we've been using for some years now.

Our customer needs something that keeps track of inventory, interfaces to some affordable parts counter gizmo, and knows what bin everything belongs in.

How about a suggestion for the parts counter?

Thanks

Phil Hobbs

We got an x-ray machine to count parts.

There are hand-cranked parts counters; you mount a reel of parts and spin it through, then you have to spool them back. It gets messy at the start and the end, with leaders and such.

We put a sticker on every bag or reel with our 7-digit part number, so we know where they go in the bins in the stockroom. We also put matching color dots as a crosscheck.

It's a hassle. Sometimes a reel is in a kit too, waiting to be partially used on the p+p machine. Or it's on a feeder. They handle that somehow.

There is a recent episode of "the Amp Hour" where they interview the one-person-company that is a vendor of such a system aimed at small businesses and individuals, and it is worth listening to. If nothing else, it might alert you to some features that you wouldn't have thought that you needed, but do.

Are you sure all of your parts will fit in those "bins"? One common problem with folks who like to needlessly inject

This is often not possible (if X and X+1 are physically very different; like 100W and 1/16W resistors).

He grinned and showed me how many "Others" would fill up that portion of the number space. Where does an electronic tape rule fit? Or, a framer's square with built in level? Or, pneumatic screwdriver? or...]

I wrote a system for a group, here. Part numbers were assigned *sequentially*; "The next available number is XXXX" (regardless of what XXXX-1 happened to have been).

Stockroom "locations" were laid out in a structured manner (so you could find location XYZ given that you happened to be standing in front of XYW, at the time).

Parts (part numbers) were placed in locations "as they fit". So, you could have vastly different types of products with vastly different part numbers sitting adjacent to each other on a particular shelf.

The software kept track of what (P/N) was where (location) and what (P/N) was what (item description).

Descriptions were encouraged to be verbose. Expecting people to agree on a standard format for a description for a particular *type* of item was silly: why is "resistor, 1/4W, 10%, film" any better than "10%, film, resistor, 1/4W"? Do you want to create a "part numbering police force" to decide how everything gets described?

Full text search lets the DBMS offer up likely candidates for any given search criteria -- assume human beings have enough common sense to refine their search objectives based on the (near instantaneous) results provided.

Once a part number is decided upon (from that search), the picklist tells you where to find it and, in the case of multiple devices, how best to walk the floor to retrieve them all. You don't want part pickers having to keep backtracking because the third item on the list is right by the first item (but, they didn't "read ahead" to discover that until they'd walked off to find the *second* item).

This was used to manage a 30,000 sq ft warehouse.

Some years later, I was touring a furniture company's warehouse and saw that they had a similar system in place: lamps stored next to sofas in some cases, *other* lamps stored next to end tables, etc. And, the forklift driver just consulted a pick list to go fetch whichever items he'd been asked to retrieve (there was no "sofa aisle" in the stacks; nor a "lamp section", etc)

Warehouse was considerably *smaller* than the one I'd instrumented. But, theirs had 50 ft tall "shelves"!

I'd install this:

Yes there will be a learning curve, particularly if you haven't yet got beyond spreadsheets. If you can get over the learning curve you will eventually find that you've created the inventory system you want and it's tailored exactly to your own needs.

What you won't have is a piece of software which is unusably complicated because it tries to please everyone. Or a piece of software which can't do half of what you want to do.

It may be too much of a jump or too time consuming for what you're asking, but that would be my approach.

Thanks. We already have a system like that for our internal use. What I'm looking for is a combination of an inexpensive parts counting gizmo with some lightweight inventory control s/w.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Any software of this nature that doesn't support a standard web interface should probably be avoided for that mistake alone.

But yeah, you might need a Linux system (or VM?) to run that.

CH

All the ones I dealt with, starting in 1986, did that. You assign a part number and under that same number there could be umpteen variants from different manufacturers. Each had to be ECO-released individually which is mandatory in highly regulated industries. Purchasing was allowed to buy any part under that stock number but no alternatives. If they wanted an alternative it had do be ECO-released. Kind of what I am doing right now for a client with a power inductor.

Maybe install VirtualBox on Windows. I use that for trying out SW that needs to be contained

I have that in reverse (Win 7 VM on Linux) but it can become a pain in the you-know-what. On older HW that has a non-vtx CPU it may not run at all anymore.

Joerg snipped-for-privacy@analogconsultants.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net:

No need for a VB on a Windows system. Windows runs Linux now.