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Posted by Thomas Bihn on 12/22/05 07:45
Thanks for the additional replies.
I realize this has got to be an unusual occurrence. This particular
product is an RF transmitter that has the seven serial numbers
programmed into the microcontroller EEPROM at the programmer station at
the same time. To avoid violating NDA with the customer, suffice it to
say that these are serials for multiple companies products.
The reason for a board ID is not so much for this particular product but
does come in useful if we want to cross reference a particular serial
number and what other serial numbers were assigned to that board. It
serves as a common tie to all the serial numbers assigned to a board. I
had originally concepted simply tracking the singular serial number
through the process, primarily test and packout and RMAs, but we have
some "boards" that actually are more accurately referred to as
"assemblies" with sub-assemblies, each with their own serial numbers.
The original concept I had was to identify a "primary serial number" to
which secondary serial numbers would be assigned. The problem with this
was that when other engineer's go to implement this, or more
importantly, if an operator is prompted to scan the serials at a testing
station, you have to add all sorts of validations to ensure the proper
serial number is scanned. We have so many different variations from a
wide array of customers that I decided it would be easier to go with the
board ID. It also will help to implement some form of tracking for
boards that actually have no serial number assigned to them.
Additionally, the current method of barcoding for one of our customers
has us using multiple pieces of information within the barcode. If it
comes back as an RMA for a software update or kludge (in electronics,
this can involve adding jumper wires, piggy backing FETs, etc), we have
been scanning in the old barcode to retreive the serial number part and
printing out a completely new barcode with the same serial part. The
problem with this method is a new label is printed (cost) and the
operator has to remove the old label, clean the board, and apply the new
one (additional handling = bad). Hopefully, I'll be able to get this
practice stopped sooner than later and allow the tracking and validation
of proper RMA handling to occur by tracking the board in the database by
whatever serial number is scanned. Eventually, I'd like to see the
practice of encoding so much information in the barcode ended and
utilizing the serial number barcode as a unique assembly identifier and
that only. This is a greatly condensed description of what we are trying
to accomplish here, but hopefully sheds some light on the logic of the
seperation between serial number ID and board ID.
As a side, we also do complete box builds of an assembly that has as
many as three circuit boards (each with their own serial number), our
company's unique identifier for the assembly, and as many as three
stinking serials on the outside of the assembly as mandated by our
customer that we are building the assembly for and the end-customer
where we are shipping them.
For this particular product, which is very unique from the others, I am
thinking of adding a table, call it Type_4_Order that has:
PK Type_4_Order_ID bigint Identity
Board_ID
Serial_Number_ID -- From the Serial_Numbers_Generated table
Serial_Number_Position -- 1,2, or 3
I will be able to then create a two column SELECT resultset with
Board_ID, Serial_Number_ID for each of the ordinal positions. With this
resultset, I'll Inner Join with the other nested SELECT statements
returning their individual results.
I know this may look ugly to many of you, but you should see the Access
databases we are using for much of the manufacturing end of our company.
Our IS department is directed towards business applications by
management and we in engineering and maunfacturing are left to our own
devices.
Any additional comments/suggestions are welcome.
Thanks again.
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