When I generated isometric piping drawings, the CAD system comprised me, a pencil, and no damn computer. The bolts were kept in the boxes the manufacturer put them in, and the BOM had enough info in a line to unequivocally identify that box of bolts.
... and people were paid to check drawings, and nobody thought that checking was a stupid extraneous redundant activity.
Then computers were sold to the world, partly justified by reduction in 'head count', and partly on the utterly false assertion that they would detect and/or prevent mistakes.
Then Supply Chain Managers and MBAs appeared, possibly dropped from hostile alien spacecraft, and declared that people were interchangeable and checkers were not needed and every goddamn tiny bolt on a hundred mile pipeline had to have its own globally unique barcode or the World Would End, and every operation had to hire nimrods who couldn't read any known language in order to read the barcodes and match them to the prints and ...
The End ain't going to be pretty, and in some ways I'm glad I won't be around to see it.
Oh. That doesn't solve your problem.
Nothing will.
Checkers, if you could find any, would reduce the incidence of problems such as you report. ... but the MBAs won't let you hire them, asserting that the error rate is acceptable from a business perspective, or more likely implying that if you were any good as an engineer, you'd do your own checking and the error rate would diminish without further cost. ... and the Supply Chain Manager will back up the MBAs and suggest that you can be replaced by an illiterate goatherder from just about anywhere, no offense intended to goatherders, literate or not.
You could mitigate the problem by keeping the bolts in their boxes for as long as possible, but that might reduce the amount of virtual paperwork used to justify the SCM's existence.
Or you might use smaller tags and denser '2D' barcodes, but that will require new scanners, or smartphones, and the MBAs won't go for that...
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
