Part number

There are also some national and industry-association initiatives which help producers and consumers codify the product based on a unified scheme to establish a common language between industrial and commercial sectors.

In a company, significant numbering systems help identify an item from its code rather than from a long description.

This enables more efficient data entry, using a keypad, which normally includes digits and dashes, and is operated one-handed, leaving the other hand free.

This comes from the era before computers, when most typographical laypeople did not need to differentiate the characters or glyphs precisely.

Some companies follow a convention of circling the dash numbers on a drawing, such as in view designators and subpart callouts.

For example, drawing number 12345 may show an assembly, P/N 12345-1, which comprises detail parts -2 ("dash two"), -3, -4, -8, and -11.

An example of such a design modification suffix is adding "V" or "Z" to the end of the part number to designate the variant of the part that is purchased "less paint", "less plating", "with the holes not yet drilled", "intentionally oversize by 0.01 mm (0.00039 in)", or any of countless other modifications.

It is also not uncommon to show only one of them on the drawing, and to define the symmetrical counterpart simply by stating that it is "opposite".

It is common in the engineering of parts, subassemblies, and higher assemblies to treat the definition of a certain part as a very well-defined concept, with every last detail controlled by the engineering drawing or its accompanying technical product documentation (TPD).

The sizes of fillets and edge breaks are common examples of such details where production staff must say, "it may easily be trivial, but it could possibly matter, and we're not the ones who can tell which is true in this case".

Although this "blending" of part designs could happen very informally in a non-mass-production environment (such as an engineering lab, home business, or prototyping toolroom), it requires more forethought when the concerns are more thoroughly separated (such as when some production is outsourced to vendors).

Today's advanced state of optical character recognition (OCR) technology also means that machines can often read the human-readable format of Arabic numerals and Latin script.