When ordering visually similar parts (that are indeed different) consider including simple or unique identifiers that help differentiate one part from the other.
Video Transcript:
Let's talk about ordering visually similar parts from OSH Cut. Today, we produce several thousand unique part numbers every single week, and with that kind of high-mix production happening everyday, it's sometimes challenging to make sure we correctly identify parts going through production. Now, we do have part labeling and organizational systems that help us do this reliably, but one thing you can do to help us produce your parts more reliably is to make sure that very visually similar parts are uniquely identified in some way.
Now, I've prepped a cart here with parts that I've recently ordered from OSH Cut. Notice that these two parts are Left and Right hand parts with a non-symmetrical hole pattern. They are different, so if one of our operators grabbed the Right-hand part and bent it with the program for the Left-hand part, it would be wrong. So, what I did to help make sure there's no confusion there is I actually uniquely labeled each of these parts. The Right-hand part gets an R like this, and the Left-hand side part gets and L.
So, very simple ... it doesn't really affect the price at all to do that, but it helps both our final inspection team and our bending team know what part they're holding when they're doing those checks and when they're writing the program and bending the part.
There's other things you can do as well; you can put notches on parts that are similar but not equal. Any kind of cosmetic thing that makes it obvious which part it is can help our team a lot when making sure they identify parts correctly.
