Michael,

We have used completely random numbers for many years, first in Oracle, 
then connected with SAP when we bought a company that used it, and now 
both connected to Omnify.  All three systems can exchange data, becuase we 
don't need to work around prefixes, suffixes, alphanumerics, etc.

Sure, to the analytical human mind, random numbers seem so - well, random.  
To the computers, they make perfect sense.  And since we humans can;t 
keep all of that information in our heads, but the computers can, guess who's 
system works better?

Don't fret, change is good, this will work for you.  It actually works very well 
for us.  It really is very easy to find things in the database, and you will find 
that you search by names, not numbers anyway.  It might cause a bit of 
angst for some of our vendors, but in the near future they will have restricted 
access to our database for searches and downloads.  I have written some 
cross linking scripts between our PCB design software and Omnify to create 
BOMs and do searches, the random numbers are a big help in sharing data 
between apps.

Hang in there, this is a good thing.  Well, except for all of the documents you'll 
have to change.  But that's job security.

Pete

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