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  • March 11, 2022
  • Reata Engineering

DFM Tip: 5 Best Practices for Revision Control in Contract Manufacturing

Complete PO

As experts in prototype machining services, we know revisions are a natural and expected part of manufacturing. While we anticipate most designs needing some tweaks throughout development, it’s helpful to have a system in place that streamlines this process—and excellent revision control is a must.

Here at Reata Engineering, we view our customers as partners, and we depend on your revision control system to ensure we’re building your parts correctly. Comprehensive revision control will save you time and money, and we’re happy to help you implement the easiest and best process to manage revisions for your parts. 

5 Ways to Ensure Excellent Revision Control

Let’s look at five best practices to ensure revision control throughout the contract manufacturing process:

1. Update your purchase order

Updating your purchase order (PO) for each revision may seem unnecessary, but it’s a crucial step in maintaining accurate documentation—and getting accurate parts.

Having an up to date PO also empowers your quality department to make informed decisions when receiving completed parts. For example, if we work with you to machine revision E of your design, but your purchase order still shows revision D, your quality department could reject the order when it arrives, creating confusion and delaying your timeline. 

While these issues usually get resolved, doing so takes time and requires back and forth that could have easily been avoided.

2. Formalize revisions

We’re happy to work with redline drawings, but they’ll need to become formal revisions at some point. 

Why? Redline drawings aren’t future-forward documents intended for reuse. Should you want to revise your design in the future, the version you have saved won’t include your edits. It’s best to make sure both the model file and print are up to date with the current revision at the same time.

3. Provide a summary of revision changes

Revision Control

As your contract manufacturing partner, knowing what exactly we’re revising helps us move faster, so we recommend summarizing the revision in the title block of your drawing before sending it over to us. 

Not all revisions fundamentally change the part; some correct grammar and language on the document or provide internal references. When we don’t know what to look for, we review your design dimension by dimension to see what’s changed, and that can eat up valuable time. 

Many customers send updated print and model information but not the engineering change order (ECO) file. If you send us that document as well, we’ll have all the information we need to produce the right parts for you at the right time.

4. Use the “one part, one print” rule

Everyone has a different way of organizing their designs and POs, with some companies listing multiple components on a single print. 

After nearly 30 years in business, we know the most efficient way to process revisions is one component per print. If we receive a five-page print containing multiple components but only one part needs revisions, we may have to comb through the entire document to identify the changes.

The “one part, one print” rule enables us to expedite your run times to get your parts sooner.

5. Advise on the disposition of parts

When we receive a revision update while we’re making your parts, we’ll need your input on the disposition of the down rev parts—should they be scrapped, reworked, or used as is? 

For example, let’s say we have four releases of a job in production, each in various manufacturing stages: purchasing, sawing, machining, and outside processes. When you request a revision change, we’ll have to determine where the new revision starts and the old one ends. We can implement revisions faster when we know what exactly is changing and how to handle in-process parts. 

Our team at Reata Engineering is committed to getting you the right parts when you need them. Comprehensive revision control helps us make that happen.

If you’re looking for a true partner in precision machining and contract manufacturing, submit a quote today! We’d love to work with you.

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7822 South Wheeling Court,
Suite AEnglewood, CO 80112

(303) 936-1350

(303) 936-1350

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