Once a production family has been defined to characterize the capacity constraints of one or more manufactured parts, a manufacturer has the ability to track the tools used by  that production family. By including the tooling information within the plan for the part, the following benefits can be achieved:

• the ability to track the tool asset being used
• the ability to log the tool life start date
• the improved visibility to the projected tool life end date based on part demand

Points to consider about the production family / tool relationship are:

• each production family can have multiple tools defined.
• each tool can only be in one production family.
• tools linked to production family may have a step number to designate parallel or sequential tools.

See also:

Access Tooling Used within a Production Family

Accessing Tool Assets