[NEXT LEVEL BLOG]

Hydrogen embrittlement is a serious phenomenon that affects the strength and performance of materials in application. This becomes particularly important when fastening hardware fails to perform as intended due to this condition. Minimizing risk should always be a consideration when establishing product specifications. Understanding the causes and steps to mitigate its occurrence is beneficial to customers (end users), suppliers, and manufacturers. 

Before jumping into implementing a custom VMI program that will undoubtedly result in improvements to your current supply chain management, there’s another important opportunity to improve efficiencies that’s often overlooked. That’s to conduct an engineering and design review of the products that drive the depth, breadth, and complexity of a company’s parts requirements. This is a rigorous examination of the key design elements of products, looking for practical ways to reduce parts inventory SKUs and potentially simplify the manufacture and assembly of these same products.

Working closely with our customers’ engineers, we search for parts redundancies that can be eliminated with simple design or drawings modifications. Manufacturers with exhaustive product offerings who haven’t gone through a disciplined parts consolidation process will almost always have a surprising number of redundancies uncovered, for no other reason than that in most new product design and engineering efforts, designers are not limited to current parts inventory. 

The motivation behind implementing a vendor managed inventory (VMI) program is to streamline your supply chain in ways that ultimately save you space, time and money (in labor, inventory, energy). But too often we see VMI programs that aren’t focused explicitly enough on directly accomplishing these things. 

The best VMI programs are aligned with – and contribute to – an organization’s overall Lean journey and consider where the organization is on the journey.