Do You Read Me? On the Limits of Manufacturing Part Numbers for Communicating Product Variety

Manufacturing part numbers (MPNs) are used to communicate product variety both for internal purposes and for external representation to customers. To simplify this communication, MPNs have been originally developed as humanreadable abbreviations of those characteristics that uniquely identify a product variant out of a modular system, thus acting both as an identifier and a description. However, the increasing complexity of customer requests forces component manufacturers to expand their product portfolios, thus pushing the descriptive character of a classic MPN to its limits. Ongoing digitalization drives product identification towards fully-digital possibilities. Nevertheless, in reality component manufacturers still rely on MPNs. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the cognitive and systemic characteristics of the MPN with regard to the underlying product structure (PS). As a result, we derive evaluation criteria for the quality of mappings from PS to MPN and apply them to typical business use cases. In doing so, we provide the first systematic overview and discussion of factors that determine MPN’s utility and usability as well as give practical guidelines for component manufacturers regarding the selection of appropriate MPN types.123