At my first Vantage implementation, we used phantoms with the configurator like @CSmith. In order to preserve which assembly the part came from, they populated a field (in this case FindNum) with something that let us know which assembly it came from once it exploded. In this case, we were identifying parts of the product, but it could easily have been the phantom part number (up to the length of FindNum. Probably could have used a CHARACTER## field too since UD Fields didn’t exist yet.)