I am a manufacturing plant manager and need to revamp our existing
part number system which has become a mess over the years.  I cannot
find anything on the web or in research that talks about "developing a
robust part number system" or "part number system best practices" or
"how to develop a part number system".  I have checked all the sites
related to the UPC bar coding system but I need something for our own
internal use that is easy to understand and also useful for warehouse,
production, purchasing and finance needs.

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 27 Feb 2005 10:00 PST

There are several discussions of parts numbering systems here:


http://www.pdmic.com/cmic/help/020707.shtml



Is this the sort of information you need?  Are these helpful?  If not,
let us know in a bit more detail how we can best assist you.


pafalafa-ga

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Clarification of Question by erler-ga on 27 Feb 2005 10:17 PST

This is the sort of information I'm looking for.  However, this site
in specific says, "Any part numbering scheme you come up with is
fine".  I'm looking for something more academic or best practices.

It was harder to find much information than I thought it would be.  I
expected someone would have a whole treatise on the subject, but I
guess I missed it.  Anyway, here's what you get for free.  :)

Here are some explanations of how a couple of manufacturers do it:
http://www.westbond.com/NUMSYS.htm
http://www.spraguegoodman.com/402/402hpart.html

The best thing to do (in my opinion) is have a system in which most of
a model number is a prescribed method of describing the item in a sort
of hierarchy (eg, "WMOTWIR12A7197628" would mean washing machine,
motor assembly, wire, 12 guage, part A7 from that diagram,
manufactured in 1976, version 28), maybe with a few characters at the
end to account for aspects that are not as easy to categorize.  This
works well to eliminate repeated numbers if you are able to make a
system customized to your inventory that can adequately describe an
item in enough detail that only one thing would really fit that
description.  The exact method would depend on what you are numbering.
 Is each part very unique (eg, all parts for a specific car brand), or
is it hard to fit them into separate categories (10,000 different
paint colors)?

If you have a really challenging set of products to number, you might
want to look at the ISBN system for books, which are large in number
and not always easy to organize by features:
http://isbn-international.org/en/manual.html