Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1477844
56 SMT007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2022 Matties: For the Fremont facility, do you rely on U.S. sourcing or is it mostly on interna- tional? Ghalili: For Fremont, Meghan's team sources mostly from the United States, but they do the sourcing for China from the U.S. source. ey work with the suppliers and distributors in the U.S. ey source it for them, but from a U.S. source. Matties: What advice would you have for OEMs that are struggling with the supply chain right now? Zou: We are still having challenges with how to reach a balance with supply and inventory con- trol. One of the key issues is on the BOM com- pletion rate. ere are cases where we have all the components for the whole BOM, except one critical item. So, we sit on an entire inven- tory just waiting for one critical part; to iden- tify those critical parts well in advance would be essential. Johnson: What can the OEM do to help? Ghalili: In the last year, we have automated much of our ERP system to highlight these issues. For example, leads and lagging of the components. Lin: We always try to balance the inventory here. Sometimes we only look at critical com- ponents, but the challenge is how well our team can control the inventory, and handle delivery. We have developed an automated clear- to-build (CTB), which runs daily. It can help check the supply and demand, and clearly see the exact timeline for the product available to promise (ATP) to ensure we meet customer delivery. is year, we upgraded our CTB. Like Meghan mentioned earlier, we assigned differ- ent risk levels for the components—red, yel- low, and green—to track each component and its individual gating situation. We have a lot of common parts amongst our customers. For example, one component may be used in more than 20 projects, which makes it very difficult to manage manually. e automated system can monitor the components and then we bal- ance production, delivery, and the inventory. Zou: Each project could have hundreds of com- ponents, so overall, we are managing thousands of components. e system helps us under- stand the overall project inventory and supply status level. Without this control, maybe only one or two gating items can cause the project to get stuck. at causes the whole inventory to build up. is kind of system can help us to identify the gating items to the project. Ghalili: We have done a lot of customization on the Oracle ERP. You have these systems that are basically like the CTB that we've been describ- ing. It goes through the whole system, identi- fies the parts that are gating, at what point and how they need to be identified. When you have a common part, the same rules used with 20 different parts, a gated situation can cause a lot of delays. Lillian Lin