As in many engineered products, a large number of parts compose a piano. Executives at Korg Italy Spa of Milan, Italy, which makes electronic keyboards and digital pianos, recently found they needed a new way to manage components.
Each Korg product contains anywhere from 300 and 1,000 components, some off the shelf, some customized. So when managers wanted to optimize the entire product-development and part-management process, they faced no small undertaking, said Franco Ripa, hardware development manager at Korg Italy.
Ripa and his colleagues were looking for a product lifecycle management system that would let them manage parallel projects and share information in-house and with outside suppliers.
The company recently brought in a PLM system from think3 of Milan, Italy, that lets engineers do just that. Korg also implemented a Web interface feature, which allows distributors to order spare parts in real time. The reseller sees the object, places it in the trolley with the price shown, and the order is processed automatically at Korg, Ripa said. This new system has cut from three to one the number of employees needed to oversee the spare-parts system
The company has now moved to the next phase of the PLM project: the exchange of parts lists with China, Ripa said.
At Korg, product engineering is done in Italy, and two facilities in China handle production.
“At present we transfer the lists manually on Excel spreadsheets, which take a considerable time to draft and check,” Ripa said. “Our objective is to ensure that our parts list is automatically present on the Chinese management system. This will enable considerable savings in the time and resources needed to manage the lists and reduce the amount of human error present in the current system.”
