Is Your Part Numbering Scheme Costing You Millions?

Best Practices for Part Numbering

Non-Intelligent Part Numbering

The Advantages

Using a non-intelligent scheme involves significantly less initial planning, since part numbers do not reference part details or characteristics. You don’t need to educate your full supply chain about what each number signifies, and you can ramp new employees quickly without relying too heavily on any one person to maintain the system. Here are a few more benefits to non-intelligent numbering schemes:

Quick and easy to issue new parts. It takes very little time to pull or issue a sequential number, so assigning a part number is quick and easy. You don’t have to know anything about the part—unlike intelligent part numbering systems that often require the assignment to go through a specific person, or department, who knows how to issue part numbers based on all rules and variants.

Little training needed. If new employees join your organization, they’ll need little to no training in order to learn, find, define, or issue part numbers.

No single point of failure. With non-intelligent part numbering, you can have multiple people pulling part numbers, and your company can continue to run efficiently without relying on trained people or teams.

Simple maintenance. It’s easy to implement and maintain a non-intelligent scheme, since it’s essentially a sequential list.

The Disadvantages

Using a non-intelligent part numbering scheme isn’t without its disadvantages, but there are fewer disadvantages if you have a system that can maintain parts and provide clarity around the type of parts outside the part number itself.

Inability to recognize part types (outside of systems). Your team members will not be able to identify what type of part they have simply by viewing a part number. However, relying on employees’ tribal knowledge as they come and go is dangerous because there will always be different levels of understanding about parts numbers when they require constant education and memorization of schemes.