In the SMD Production Department, tiny devices, like chips, transistors etc. are mounted on the circuit boards by the use of the SMD (Surface Mounting Device) machine. This SMD machine takes the inputs (tiny devices) in forms of reels. Reels of the desired material is loaded to the machine and software does the rest of the job.
As the SMD Machine needs materials in reels, the requirement for a separate warehouse, other than the Raw Materials Warehouse, occurred. The cause of this requirement is that the shelves of the Raw Materials Warehouse were not suitable for storing this kind of sensitive devices and that finding the material you need would be very time consuming as there are lots of reels to search.
For the reasons mentioned above two other warehouses are built. One is the SMD Inventory, the other is SMD WIP Inventory. These warehouses consisted of stocking machines called KARDEX. KARDEX is a machine that could be mounted inside a wall and that could store and retrieve material in its trays.
The model of KARDEX used in the SMD Inventory uses a robot arm to fetch the tray required, and the model of KARDEX used in SMD WIP Inventory uses a chain system to retrieve the tray required.
When a work order is opened for the parts produced on SMD Machine, the work order form is first sent to SMD Inventory, instead of Raw Materials Inventory. In SMD Inventory, requirements for the work order is retrieved from the KARDEX and sent to SMD WIP Inventory. That is, the usage of SMD Inventory is in the responsibility of the Production Planning Department. After the requirements of the work order is sent and loaded to the KARDEX in the SMD WIP Inven ...