Last week, Andres, Harish and I toured Brill Electronics, an electronic component distributor in Oakland, CA. Our excellent tour guide was Phil Wall who showed us every nook and cranny of Brill, from the warehouse floor, to the sales department upstairs.

I have trouble keeping parts in my workspace in order, but keeping track of tens of thousands of different parts in a giant warehouse is another story altogether. Phil explained the two main ways to organize a warehouse: alphabetically by manufacturer and a scheme where identical parts are binned together and placed in a random shelf location. A big computer database keeps track of where everything lives. Brill is moving towards the random scheme because it makes adding new parts much easier. Rather than trying to squeeze a box in-between two other boxes, you just find some open shelf space, put the box there and tell computer the location. Another advantage is that the computer can tell the "part picker" the shortest path to take as they collect the parts for an order. Just make sure you have a backup copy of the database!

Seeing the inner workings of a distributor's warehouse in action was great for us - it's easy to forget that the parts on Octopart are not just rows in a database. Thanks Phil!