Hi all,
We are revising our part numbering scheme and that is getting rid of “.” characters on them. This is an example 75.88 which is included on our part number. What would be the best way to change this without having decimal on it.
The obvious answer is to use a dash, like 75-88 That’s a character most bar codes support. And it is a key on the keypad of a keyboard (speeding manual data entry).
One down side is that exporting to excel, might accidentally convert some P/N’s to Dates.
Typing 12-05 into an Excel cell, converts it to a date of 12/5/2020, and displays as 5-Dec
Hi Calvin,
That’s we thought too, but we use dashes to replace spaces, replace letters X as multiples and so on. Is there any alternative aside from dashes that you know of?
Thanks for the quick response.
Just don’t use spaces… also consider that Code-39 is a standard bar code set that has limited values. Here is a portion from a white paper I wrote many years ago.
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Our original implementation (Vista 4), was total anarchy. Most P/N’s were just a description. Here are some:
CHM#8
XHU-BOLT1/2"
PADEYE3/8"
XH1/2"REBAR
XAPL.50"X43.5"/100
When we migrated to E10 (from V8 which used P/N’s like listed above), we decided to go with a brand new P/N structure. And yes, there was tons of pushback.
We went with a 2 letter, dash, 4 digit P/N like CB-0001.
The 2 letters are for the type of part, and we have about 10 of these. For example:
CB- Cable
CH- Chemical (glues, epoxies, anti-freeze, alcohol, etc...)
EC- Electrical component
HW- Hardware
TX- Textiles (fabric, thread, etc...)
There a few discussion on here regarding P/N schemes. The majority opinion, is to avoid intelligent P/N’s (ones where the segments mean specific things, like: HW-PHSC-0440-1.000)
People will complain about having to learn new numbers. But my counter to that was, that they didn’t know any of the old P/N’s when the first joined the company either.
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Stop it! You’re making my eyes bleed!
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A semi-significant part numbering scheme is the way to go.
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Here it is - written years ago, but I still hold by these standards 
:Epicor Part Numbering Standards.pdf (799.2 KB)
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Another thing to point out is if you use Hyphens and you expect to be able to double click and select the whole part number to select it, it will only select the part that you double clicked on.
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Another comment that I want to make is don’t forget the power of the part cross reference, and the ability to use barcodes on UOMs per part. I’ve never tried putting in a non-barcode string into those fields 
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