Tracking Sheets, Rolls, and Lengths of Material

MILLBURY, Mass., Nov. 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- BellHawk Systems Corporation, is pleased to announce the availability of a new white paper "Tracking Sheets, Rolls, and Lengths of Material." This white paper is available for download from the White Papers link at the bottom of www.BellHawk.com.

Tracking dimensioned inventory, such as sheets, rolls, and lengths of material is easy enough provided that you only have to track these in a few different sizes, such as 4'x8' sheets of plywood, 30" wide rolls of plastic, and 6' lengths of steel pipe. In this case you simply create a separate part number (or SKU) for each size that you keep in stock.

But what happens, if you need to track offcuts, such as a 2'x3' piece of plywood, a 12" wide roll of plastic left over from slitting a 30" wide master roll, or a 2' length of steel pipe that is returned to stock?

One approach is to create a separate part number for each possible width and/or length you could have in stock. This quickly becomes an overwhelming task, especially for make-to-order manufacturers who may have an essentially infinite number of sizes, left over from manufacturing processes.

Another approach is to use a common part number for a specific materials, with a unit of measure such as square feet or pounds that is common to all sizes. This works well from an accounting point of view but not from an operational viewpoint. You cannot cut a 6'x1' piece from a 4'x4' sheet, even though there are more square feet than are needed in stock.

In this white paper, we describe an approach used by the BellHawk software to solve this problem by tracking each sheet, roll, or length of material as a container of materials with length and width dimensions.

This white paper is written by Dr. Peter Green, who is the CTO of BellHawk Systems Corporation. BellHawk Systems provides real-time work-in-process and materials tracking systems for a wide variety of manufacturing, repair and other industrial organizations as well as materials traceability systems for food processors.

For more information, please contact Emily Green, [email protected], (508)-865-8070 x302.

SOURCE BellHawk Systems Corporation