Going Electronic #7

Automated Document Numbering

You have most likely been faced with the dilemma of having two Purchase Orders or Work Orders with the same number and not being sure what parts were supposed to be on which. WinAir users are never faced with this dilemma, as the system automatically generates document numbers and ensures that each number is unique. Even better, the system prompts users with the next available task number.

Imagine how well your cheque book would work if you had to fill in your own cheque numbers. We overcome our relatively poor memories by having pre-printed forms made up with sequential numbers on them. In effect, WinAir does the same thing, but without the printing costs!

We recognize that some Maintenance or Inventory Managers don't like to hear that they can't continue to use the numbering system they have developed for their Work Orders (Tasks and/or Production Cards), Purchase Orders, Repair Orders, Invoices, etc. For example, you may have devised your numbering system to get useful information from the number, such as the year, the customer or the department. You're likely to find that using WinAir, which automatically generates numbers, rather than relying on a manual system, is useful for several reasons.

In just seconds you can sort and filter POs by number, vendor, date opened or date closed. You can also generate a list of individual outstanding items and sort them by one of seven different fields. With this kind of functionality, does it really matter whether the PO numbers contain the year, or have 10 digits instead of 5? And think about how much time this saves in comparison to manually finding every outstanding part on every PO from even just one vendor!

Arranging a list in chronological order raises another interesting point; one that many people don't consider when they devise their own numbering system. Computers can easily put figures in order ? 2 comes before 4, 6 comes before 10, etc. However, numbers which are actually text rather than figures, like the numbers on POs or Work Orders, or even part numbers, are not so simple. For example, if the numbers are actually text, 11 will come before 2 unless you fill out the blank spaces with zeros. This is because the computer will put the first characters in order, then the second, etc. That's why the first cheque in your book is 001, not 1. And it's why WinAir document numbers have a bunch of leading zeros in front of them, otherwise a list of PO's would look like this: 1, 11, 111, 2, 21, 211, 3, 31, etc. It doesn't matter what program you use to sort a text list, the result will be the same. Try sorting a list of text cells in a spreadsheet.

Thanks to the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), computers are coded to always place numbers before letters; 12 before AN, M8 before MS. Apparently they didn't speak to a stores manager before making this a standard. Moreover, managers who insist that the shelves be laid out with letters before numbers make conversion to an automated (electronic) system hard on everybody involved.

While you can avoid creating duplicate documents by using WinAir, with only one exception (Purchase Orders), automatically generated numbers cannot be changed. Purchase Orders can be changed as some organizations, particularly governments, have accounting practices that insist on using PO numbers that their accounting system generates. In these cases, they then have to duplicate POs in WinAir using the numbers generated in the accounting system to maintain part traceability.

And even though that is the only number that can be changed in WinAir, we still have users calling us and asking why all the old POs with numbers that they put 98 and 99 in front of are coming after the 00 and 01 POs. There isn't anything wrong... they may think that 99 is older than 00, but the computer doesn't think so.

If you use document numbers generated by WinAir, switching to an automated numbering system can be easy and painless.