I work for a small manufacturer. We ship a product with several different PCB assemblies. We've never had a good system to track exactly what goes out the door to each customer. I am in the process of rectifying this and wanted to see what others do. At a minimum I want to relate the PCB revision and PCB assembly revision as well as the firmware revision back to a serial number. I'd like to get even more detailed, but I am not sure at what point it is too much data/work. I thought of tracking the lot that the assembly came from and perhaps even trace this back to the reel of a particular component. It would be nice to say "we have a problem with component x from lot y... how many boards are affected?". At this point I can see it becoming quite complex because we never use an entire reel of one particular component on a given lot of PCB assemblies. For example, a capacitor from a single reel might be used in several different PCB assembly lots (POs). Moreover, since we only assemble the final product here and our PCB assemblies are provided turnkey this means we would have to rely on our contract manufacturer to provide this data.
So, I was just curious how other manufacturers tracked their products and if anyone got to that level of detail.
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