for calculating minimum images to service customer orders 280 the system for calculating minimum images to service customer orders 280 calculates and identifies the combinations of base parts that exist in a set of records and maintains all parts taken against that image stack within the historical record set by the user the system for calculating minimum images to service customer orders 280 identifies an actual number of calculated image stacks along with an estimate of the size of the image stack based upon the size of existing zip and script files accordingly the system for calculating minimum images to service customer orders 280 identifies the number of images stacks needed to service orders and the size of each of these stacks the system for calculating minimum images to service customer orders 280 further calculates part take rates i e the number of times a particular combination of parts is ordered and thus installed on target systems and overall image size for each calculated image stack referring to fig3 a flow chart of the operation of the system for calculating and identifying unique orders 260 is shown more specifically the system for calculating and identifying unique orders 260 starts operation by gathering the part information for a given system barcode at step 310 the part information includes software part information and hardware part information the software part information includes the software part referred to as an srv and a part number that functions as a passed parameter to a software part referred to as the infopart for the software the srv may identify the software part as a base part inforparts perform functional variations based upon the existence of an inforpart in the order.