Stocks
Today, I want to talk about the importance of keeping stocks.
Whilst my time in crafter’s lab, sometimes things just break and stopped working for a reason or another. And these are just unavoidable. Therefore, some precautions should be taken to mitigate the damages from these issues. And one of them is keeping stocks. Let me explain.
As I was under a deadline to get a box for our speaker out of the shop, we needed some plastic 3D printed parts to assemble our box. However, I wasn’t able to meet this deadline because our 3D printer broke while trying to print out this part, first try. And we didn’t keep any of those parts in stock. The are several reasons for this:
Our shop was running out of space, and I thought these parts could be printed in demand, so no point in keeping them in stock.
It was a newly developed part, so we didn’t want to keep a lot of it in stock in case we change the design.
We make the box in rare occasions, so this particular part was rarely needed.
Due to this unforeseen issue, we shipped the box without the parts. The 3D printer was broken for about a month, and this had also halted a lot of our research and development, as 3D printer is both a good manufacturing tool and a prototyping tool. When the printer was finally fixed, I started keeping stocks, even if it was just 2 parts for a part.
Though I still don’t believe that stocks should be kept for every parts there is, as there are ways around this issue. And stocks should not be kept for every parts especially if space is a limitation to you. Stocks take up so much space. When there is so much parts of parts to keep, and organisation isn’t your thing, there is no point to keep stocks if you can’t find where you have kept it. This was especially true for the shop was I was working at. So I propose a good way around this issue is to have another 3D printer.
I didn’t keep stock at the first place was because I didn’t foresee that the 3D printer would have been broken at such a crucial moment and for such a long time. Having another 3D printer would partially mitigate this issue, as there would ideally always have one working 3D printer, but there would still be some truly unlucky circumstances where both printer would break down at the same time.
The reasons for having more than 1 3D printer is more than just trying to print more stuff out in a shorter span of time, it is also about fail safe, that you will always have one working printer at all time. In another way, having another 3D printer is like keeping 3D printer as stock. When one is out, there is always another.
