In such a system, the user may use the part number "HSC0424PP" for that screw. 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. For example:   In general, there are two types of part numbering systems: significant (a.k.a. "intelligent") and non-significant (a.k.a. "non-intelligent"). Significant part numbering systems are easier to use if you are trying to identify an item through the use of its code inside your company rather than a long description; however, many variations can start to appear when the code is used by other companies, which may be your distributors, and then people can become confused. Non-significant part numbers are easier to assign and manage. You can still create a structure where you can have a category and then a sequential number e.g. 231-1002 (2=Hardware 3=Screw 1=Phillips then the unique number 1002) This is also more efficient for data entry where using numbers and dashes are part of a normal keypad which means you don't have to use both hands on a keyboard. One other bonus is that people usually understand numbers easier, and when you store products in a warehouse, you can put items in numerical order (for example, lower numbers at one end of an aisle, and as you continue, the numbers increase). There is a strong tradition in part numbering practice, in use across many corporations, to use suffixes consisting of a "dash" followed by a number comprising 1 or 2 digits (occasionally more). These suffixes are called dash numbers, and they are a common way of logically associating a set of detail parts or subassemblies that belong to a common assembly or part family. For example, the part numbers 12345-1, 12345-2, and 12345-3 are three different dash numbers of the same part family. In precise typographical and character encoding terms, it is actually a hyphen, not a dash, that is usually used; but the word "dash" is firmly established in the spoken and written usage of the engineering and manufacturing professions; "dash number", not "hyphen number", is the standard term. 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.