In today’s world, millions of products from high-tech and medical companies rely on the usage of chips or semiconductors.
However, the increased dependency on chips for each product has resulted in a chip shortage as the demand surpasses the supply. This has translated into a unique challenge for all companies utilizing chips – especially businesses involved in manufacturing high-tech and medical products.
Manufacturing businesses have been forced to increase the quality of the current stock of chips they own and extend the life of their chip-based devices and products through well-managed and maintained inventory.
With over 17 years of experience in the manufacturing and rental industries, we at STAEDEAN have seen various businesses go through different trends and empowered them to stay ahead of the curve by leveraging the right technology and software embedded in Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP.
This article will share how high-tech and medical companies can beat the challenge of the global chip shortage by effectively managing their inventory through serialization.
Serialized inventory tracking is tracking items in your inventory (which you either rent or sell) by assigning each product within your inventory with a unique serial number. It is more than using a traditional SKU for a product as it allows you to track each product as an individual item, making it easier to manage warranties or guarantees associated with your products.
Below you can see the journey of a laptop, scanned through each stage of the supply chain:
The chip shortage which hit the international manufacturing market is a big reason for companies in the high-tech and medical industries to adopt serialization of their inventory. Serially tracked inventory gives you greater control over your inventory as you can track and trace your product’s journey through each phase of the lifecycle.
Additionally, it’s no news that high-tech and medical device manufacturers are heavily regulated, dealing with products of high value, making serialization a necessity.
With serialization, you can get a comprehensive understanding of the entire lifecycle of any product in your manufacturing business. It provides you with details about when a particular product was manufactured and sold, how many times it was serviced and maintained, what kind of operating system it runs on, and so on.
You can track your inventory through the design, production, testing, distribution, and maintenance phases. This makes it easier to manage issues around quality control and avoid shipping defective products.
Additionally, if defective items do get out, then product recalls are simpler and quicker as you could use the serial numbers to recall specific products instead of executing a blanket recall.
As there is a serial number assigned to each product, you can know all the information about the product with its serial number.
Products such as cell phones, laptops, PCs, or medical devices such as oxygen machines, ECG equipment, scanning devices, and so on, have comprehensive warranties and guarantees attached to them.
The serial number tells you when you’ve sold the product, making any issues related to warranty repairs easy as you can determine the valid warranty period for the customer.
This makes the maintenance of your devices much easier as you always have the product history accessible before you carry out any repair activities on the product.
Some countries or locations have government laws and regulations mandating serial numbers for tracking products. This is especially true in the case of drug manufacturing or biotech companies.
Each medical product must be serialized to ease issues around tracking, recalls, or counterfeiting.
Some examples of government regulations mandating serialization of medical products include:
Serial numbers being unique, can easily be used to prove ownership of products, especially in the cases of loss or theft. This acts as a form of security for companies using serialization.
For instance, if a laptop is stolen from a retailer, the serial number is scanned every time the laptop moves from one location to another. The serial number has details of the origin attached to it, and this helps in returning the stolen product to the rightful owner or manufacturing company.
Serialization prevents other competitors or malicious businesses in the market from swapping and selling inferior products — as your products are identified through the unique serial number.
This is critical for medical device companies as it’s a matter of a person’s life, and manufacturers must be able to ensure accountability for each product from their company.
This allows you to ensure the quality of your products and secure delivery of your goods from the point of dispatch until the product reaches the end customer.
Your customers will also be happy to use your products, as they know that the product delivered has not been tampered with, is original, and of the highest quality.
By now, you’ve understood the significance of serialized tracking of your inventory. However, it’s critical to note that serialization cannot be executed efficiently without the proper technology in place.
High-tech, medical, and chip-based device companies should invest in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to begin their serialization journey.
You should look for an ERP system that supports and offers:
If you are a company manufacturing medical devices, high-tech equipment, or chip-based products, you must be curious to know how to get to the next step — adopting serialization with the right technology, in the most efficient and seamless manner.
Well, we have you covered! If your long-term business goal is to move to cloud-based ERP, offering end-to-end visibility into your product lifecycle as a lead-to-cash solution, you can explore our rental software, STAEDEAN Rental Management, embedded in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Supply Chain Management.
There are various benefits a rental solution offers to high-tech and medical companies, and you can evaluate whether our solution could be one of your options, by checking out the factsheet.
The factsheet will share information on: