During my interactions with many customers, I have been asked if there is an easy method to identify ‘Orphan Parts’.  The criteria for categorizing a part as an Orphan Part are somewhat unique depending on the customer, but there are some general rules that qualify them.  Some of these rules are mentioned below,

-          The part should be in a frozen status.

-          The Part should not be used in any assembly.

-          The part should not have any child Parts.

-          It should not have been classified as a Standard Part.

Why is finding Orphaned Parts critical for Companies?

Most companies have data spread across multiple platforms including legacy systems. It’s very important for them to reuse Parts that were created earlier.  It is estimated that creating a simple Part costs as much as a few thousand dollars for a big company.  When an engineer starts to build an assembly, he may ignore that a part is already available in the system, and may create a new part. This happens fairly commonly across companies, especially in Big firms.

How to Solve this problem?

We have a simple command to query and fish out the orphaned parts that satisfy the conditions mentioned in the beginning.  When this code is implemented, the users can get the command as shown in the home screen, and, upon invoking this, the Orphaned Parts are displayed as shown.

How to import the command.?

Unzip and Copy the attached files to C:\\temp directory

From mql import the admin objects

Import admin * from file “C:\\temp\\bk_PartsSummary.exp”;

Import prog * from file “C:\\temp\\BK_Honeywell_Utils.exp”;

Import admin * from file “C:\\temp\\bk_OrphanParts.exp”;

Modify menu “My Desk” add command bk_OrphanParts;

Compile prog BK*;

Reload cache and test.