Your current requirements do not take into consideration the effect of time: sooner or later, your company will modernize its catalogue or reorganize its organizational structures. Items will then have to be organized differently:

• If you opted for a dumb sequential numbering, you don't care: you just change some attributes of the item. And there you go!

• If you opted for a meaningful numbering, that embeds structural information, it'll be terrible:

  • You'll have to break the former numbering and people will be confused.
  • Moreover, the meaningful numbering could have hidden some requirements for filtering the catalogue according to additional criteria. So the reshuffling might even disrupt some processes.
  • Item lalebels on the stock shelves or printed on the boxes cannot be changed just overnight like in a database?
  • Finally, customers out there might have ongoing orders, or long term contracts for these items. So that you cannot change the external reference like that to adopt a new numbering: this would be a painful transitioning however youll be doing it.

So yes: Why not just sequential numeric? Is there any tangible argument against it, being understood that you can always have a popup or a link showing additional item attributes, or even print what's needed on labels if it's relevant.

Your current requirements do not take into consideration the effect of time: sooner or later, your company will modernize its catalogue or reorganize its organizational structures. Items will then have to be organized differently:

• If you opted for a dumb sequential numbering, you don't care: you just change some attributes of the item. And there you go!

• If you opted for a meaningful numbering, that embeds structural information, it'll be terrible:

  • You'll have to break the former numbering and people will be confused.
  • Moreover, the meaningful numbering could have hidden some requirements for filtering the catalogue according to additional criteria. So the reshuffling might even disrupt some processes.
  • Item labels on the stock shelves or printed on the boxes cannot be changed just overnight like in a database?
  • Finally, customers out there might have ongoing orders, or long term contracts for these items. So that you cannot change the external reference like that to adopt a new numbering: this would be a painful transitioning however you'll be doing it.

So yes: Why not just sequential numeric? Is there any tangible argument against it, being understood that you can always have a popup or a link showing additional item attributes, or even print what's needed on labels if it's relevant.

The problem that you do not see in the current requirements is the effect of time: sooner or later, your company will modernize its catalogue or reorganize its organizational structures. Items will then have to be organized differently:

• If you opted for a dumb sequential numbering, you don't care: you just change some attributes of the item. And there you go!

• If you opted for a meaningful numbering, that embeds structural information, it'll be terrible:

  • You'll have to break the former numbering and people will be confused.
  • Moreover, the meaningful numbering could have hidden some requirements for filtering the catalogue according to additional criteria. So the reshuffling might even disrupt some processes.
  • Item lalebels on the stock shelves or printed on the boxes cannot be changed just overnight like in a database?
  • Finally, customers out there might have ongoing orders, or long term contracts for these items. So that you cannot change the external reference like that to adopt a new numbering: this would be a painful transitioning however youll be doing it.

So yes: Why not just sequential numeric? Is there any tangible argument against it, being understood that you can always have a popup showing additional item attributes, or even print what's needed on labels if it's relevant.

Your current requirements do not take into consideration the effect of time: sooner or later, your company will modernize its catalogue or reorganize its organizational structures. Items will then have to be organized differently:

• If you opted for a dumb sequential numbering, you don't care: you just change some attributes of the item. And there you go!

• If you opted for a meaningful numbering, that embeds structural information, it'll be terrible:

  • You'll have to break the former numbering and people will be confused.
  • Moreover, the meaningful numbering could have hidden some requirements for filtering the catalogue according to additional criteria. So the reshuffling might even disrupt some processes.
  • Item lalebels on the stock shelves or printed on the boxes cannot be changed just overnight like in a database?
  • Finally, customers out there might have ongoing orders, or long term contracts for these items. So that you cannot change the external reference like that to adopt a new numbering: this would be a painful transitioning however youll be doing it.

So yes: Why not just sequential numeric? Is there any tangible argument against it, being understood that you can always have a popup or a link showing additional item attributes, or even print what's needed on labels if it's relevant.