Tracking spare parts of subassemblies of end products

This may only confuse the issue, but the car business has changed in recent years. ... okay, decades.

Nobody stocks or sells individual parts anymore; they only stock 'kits', or 'units' or 'FRU's, which seem to be grouped so that you always walk away from the parts counter poorer by at least $100, even if the part you actually need should only cost $1.

E.g., you can't buy a door latch, or a door latch operating rod, or a Tinnerman clip that retains the door latch operating rod to the door latch. All you can buy is a kit that contains every damn part for a door assembly but the door itself.

Similarly, you may not be able to buy just a piston, but an assembly comprising piston, pin, rings, connecting rod and cap, and bearings.

I think you can see the advantage >to the manufacturer< of stocking and selling only kits. Now, you have to find a way to sell your customers on accepting that practice as standard.



Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

Well, there's more than one way to skin a cat, and for 'complex' machines like cars the appropriate approach may be different than for simpler items.

You could just go very conservative in your doc control, chasing all changes up through the drawing pack so that the top level designation changes every time a different spare would be required.

Alternatively (or possibly additionally),it may be that you actually prepare a 'FRU' or spares list or similar for each 'model'. You still need good config control to make sure that changes are tracked and the 'model' designation changed accordingly and the spare list updated.

Or, for lower volume stuff, it may be that you assign a serial number to each unit and take a 'snapshot' of the rev of all relevant documentation when it was built and store this information in a data base of some kind. (In lieu of each unit your could do each batch/block).

Then there are the various combination's/extrapolations of the above.