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.
This article is an excerpt from the DOD Suppliers Guide