Management of Materials With Shelf Life

Management of Materials With Shelf Life

Some buy materials like glues, resins, pastes and chips, etc function well only within their specific shelf life. The supply of such materials with shelf Life always remains a great challenge, for if their inventories can’t be completely consumed within the shelf life, those inventories will become expired and obsolete and thus have to be scrapped, while if they are not sufficient enough to cover the aggregate demands within the shelf life, materials shortages will be encountered, customer demands can’t be satisfied, and customer on time delivery (OTD) performance will suffer. What a dilemma!

Are there good ways to deal with this dilemma? Below are some practices

l Find ways to extend the shelf life of those materials if their shelf can be extended
For example, the shelf life of some chips may become longer if they are assembled to final products. Of course we’d better be quite prudent because this may simply transfer the risk rather than to eliminate the risk especially when the final products can’t be sold as expected.

l Try to shorten the lead time of those materials with shelf life

As a rule, the shelf life of a material starts to be countered down when it’s transformed into its final shape. Generally speaking the shorter the transport time of a material with shelf life, the more comfortable we become when dealing with the issue of shelf life

l Increase the ordering frequency, decrease the order quantity

l Use discrete or lot for lot planning method to avoid order modification parameters inflate the order quantity

l Better demand management to make the upper stream demand (parent demand) as stable as possible