Sparrow ERP – Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS)

Bill of Material (BoM) and Component Placement List (CPL)

Usually main input from customer to start EMS process is usually set of BoM, CPL and Board design (in Gerber or other formats). One of the first activity is to analyse the BoM with CPL and making sure that either components Manufacturing Part Numbers (MPNs) are mentioned or not; if not then based on description matching component should be suggested. Once the entire BoM is complete with MPNs, then price check and market availability check needs to be done, usually by sending inquiries to multiple suppliers and selecting appropriate supplier after receiving quotation. That becomes the first part of job quotation, the second part is to calculate assembly process cost, which usually is straightforward and fast based on some inputs. This whole process can take several hours to several days depend on how fast your can process the BoM and get the component prices.

Sparrow solves this problem by providing innovative tools that reduces this process time from days to minutes. This increases the efficiency of sending price quotations to customer dramatically and increases customer conversion ratio.

Sourcing of components

Once the customer accepts our quotation and decides to order with us, the immediate task is to re-check the market availability of components and making sure that there are no major upward price fluctuations. Tools in Sparrow again comes in handy to do this task automatically.

Within a BoM there could also be components those are supplied  by customer himself or some of them should be sourced but not be placed. Sparrow handles this situation very well.

One or multiple Purchase Orders (POs) can be raised to suppliers for single BoM. They can all be linked together with a Sales order and components received can be exclusively kept for a specific Sale Order in Sparrow.

When supplier sends the components, one or multiple receipts can be generated and Sparrow keeps track of status of each component quantity till it is fully received. Each item received is serialized either by Lot or Unit. Barcode or QR code labels can be generated and  Inventory system in Sparrow keeps track of stock movement of each item.

Manufacturing process

Before starting assembly process it is necessary to make sure that the required components are in stock. Component Placement List (CPL) also needs to be verified against BoM so that both are matching; Sparrow has tools to carry out this actions.

Each Manufacturing order (MO) needs to be assigned a Routing process, in Sparrow different routing processes can be created based on different types of boards and customer requirement. Each step of routing process can be assigned time attributes that can be used to determine estimated total time to complete the job. The estimated time for each MO helps system to determine the load on factory and can also be used to give shipment commitment to customer.

Logistics and Invoicing

One of the important aspects of the EMS industry is to effectively handle shipment on demand and manage returns and recall. In Sparrow partial shipment allows you to handle the shipment of boards as and when the customer wants it out of his total ordered boards. Handling of returns are also easy to manage. Each assembled board is serialized, the serial number makes traceability possible.

Equipment maintenance

Performing preventive and breakdown maintenance of equipment ensures that assembly lines are up and running when required. It ensures a high quality of production and time efficiency. Sparrow has a module to handle both preventive and breakdown maintenance effectively.

This case study focuses only on important aspects of the Electronics Manufacturing (EMS) process, there are many other functionalities of Sparrow ERP system which is beyond the scope of this document to cover. If you have any questions of your specific need or business scenarios then kindly send us a question on info@intellial.com.