PLM using Parts&Vendors

Parts&VendorsTM was the seminal multi-user application in the late 90’s for embedded-electronics design teams to manage parts and assemblies. Running on Windows 98SE (originally), Parts&Vendors managed everything to do with embedded product development, including tracking parts, vendors, manufacturers, purchasing, supporting documents, and even rudimentary stock control for low-volume manufacturing. Teams worked efficiently with more cooperation, less bureaucracy, and at much lower cost, than possible with other solutions of the time.

Parts&Vendors was discontinued in January 2014, almost 15 years after it was released IMHO due to insurmountable technical debt. The Jet-type database did not handle clients crashing or high WAN latencies gracefully, and the codebase had not kept pace with Windows development practices.

Although no longer available, Parts&Vendors remains useful as a gold standard for evaluating PLM capabilities of ERP systems, such as ERPNext and webERP.

Parts&Vendors UX / UI 

Item Master Tab

Parts are accessed through the Item Master tab.

Item Details

Selecting a part provides detailed information on sources (vendors) as well as other useful information.

Files and URLs

Documents and web sites can be associated with a part,

making it easy to access local documents or a web page for reference.

Unfortunately PV did not include a document control user interface to keep things in order, or utilities to verify document paths or list parts referencing a particular file. The shared directory approach worked well for a small conscientious team, or one with a dedicated “librarian”, but not with a more “entrepreneurial” team (if you know what I mean <wink>).

Assemblies

A part may be grouped with others in an Assembly. You can easily tell what assemblies include a particular part in PV from the part’s Used On tab. 

It’s also easy to navigate from a part to a containing assembly, and back. This is also called traversing a product tree containing child parts and parent parts.

An assembly has a Parts List (aka Bill-of-Materials or BOM) that lists its child parts.

Purchasing

Parts can be easily ordered,

An order can accumulate parts until it is placed with a vendor, eventually resulting in a purchase Purchase Order (PO).

In a smaller organization, the engineering team often does the ordering themselves. In a larger organization, a “real” purchase order may need to be created in a separate parallel system (e.g. QuickBooks). The exact process will depend on an organization’s size, structure, and history.

Receiving

When the ordered parts arrive, the PO is retrieved and the order item marked received, 

which updates the stock on hand.

The assembly Parts List is one way to see when the parts necessary to build an assembly are in stock.

Manufacturing

Once all the child parts for an assembly are in stock, a “Kit List” is generated from the “Build” tab for manufacturing. Stock on hand can be reduced for the kitted items, and later increased for the finished assembly when completed. 

Customers

PV can also manage clients and client orders, although the functionality is not integrated with stock control and closing an order does not reduce quantity on hand of the ordered items. The functionality is understandable though given it was never a goal of PV to be a POS (Point Of Sale) or CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. 

 

This completes a quick refresher of Parts&Vendors. In the next post I will compare ERPNext to Parts&Vendors.

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