UID Planning – Plan for Change
As you put together your plan to comply with UID requirements for DOD suppliers, it is a good idea to think about the future. The business you are doing now may not be the business you are doing in the future.
How will changes in your business affect your UID plan?
- More or fewer shipments, shipping containers, and parts that require UID. Think about how your planned process will scale to accommodate these changes. How much change would have to take place for you to need more or fewer resources (people, printers, barcode scanners, etc.)? What is the part of the process that will scale the least and is there a way to mitigate that lack of scalability?
- Distributing or consolidating your process steps and resources. If you are just starting with UID, perhaps you have few shipments with UID requirements. Maybe you want to keep responsibility for UID compliance with one person for now. But in the future you may want to distribute that responsibility to more people. For instance, you may later want to have one person or group submitting WAWF Receiving Reports, a second person or group packaging the parts, and a third person or group printing container labels and submitting WAWF Pack Data. Does your UID plan allow for distributing or consolidating these steps as best suits your business? You never want to be in the situation of letting your systems dictate your process.
- More or fewer requirements. Maybe you have requirements now for WAWF and UID, but not RFID. How will your plan adapt to the addition of an RFID requirement? If you primarily have RFID requirements now, how will your plan adapt to shipments that may not require RFID?
- Different parts. Different parts mean different considerations for part marking, packaging, and load configuration. If you have 1 UID part in 1 exterior container shipped with a small package carrier, you will find a very different landscape should you have to evolve to more complicated shipments, like multiple UIDs in a container, adding palletization, etc. Adding embedded UIDs also adds a new dimension to UID compliance.
