Parts Feeding Tip: Large Rewards for Supplier Integration at Product Design Stages
Theory currently being taught in premier Supply Chain Management courses is to integrate suppliers at the product design stage. Involving an automation equipment supplier at this point will greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to introduce your product to the market and can equate to extremely large cost reductions and market share gains. It is also used to develop strategic competitive advantages by strengthening relationships.
Integrating suppliers at the product design stage enables them to provide useful and often much-needed insight. Obstacles and opportunities can be realized prior to implementation.
Early in the design stage of an assembly machine, the parts used in the assembly should be analyzed to determine how well they would feed in a vibratory feeder bowl.
Take a ball bearing as an extreme example: this part will not feed up the spiral track in the feeder bowl. However, it is easily fed with an alternative style bowl. Another important consideration is how reliably a part will orient in a feeder. A part needs some geometry that allows the bowl tooling to tell one side from the other or one end from the other. That so-called “checking point".
