Effective inventory management of PCBA production for mobile devices

This paper describes the concept of the risk pooling and its application into effective inventory management of PCBA production for mobile devices. The application is to aggregate all common components demands of PCBA models and manage them through just in time replenishment with kit-to-lines. Only those unique parts are kitted directly to production lines. The results of the application illustrate that huge inventory reduction can be achieved by aggregating and managing the common components at one location for different PCBA models. In addition, this paper demonstrates the statistical analysis of probability of line disconnections due to the uncertainties of production rates and lead times of kits supply. It indicates that different lot sizes could be applied for different PCBA models in order to minimize the line stops due to the risk of line disconnections.