Part of our cleanup is to help unify what we call certain things. We just finished cleaning up the many ways that EMail ( or e-Mail, or E-Mail, or E Mail,or email) were spelled in labels throughout the system.
Now we have another field that holds the Engineering Drawing Number. We found that throughout the years, in the many various places that this is stored, that we have various label names (although the actual column name is unified).
We want to make this better. Currently we use: Draw, Eng Draw, Draw Num
but… what SHOULD we use? Any of the above? or something new such as: Draw ID, Tech Draw, Drawing
Your thoughts and comments are appreciated. Here are the choices in Alphabetical order for your votes (or comment with additional options).
If we’re just talking about labels, a different tact might be empowering the Internationalization (I16) engine by making it more performant. This is a very English-centric poll for default labels. Why not let people choose the label in English or any other language?
with our language pack, you CAN change the label to anything you want… The way that it works is that it looks up the text you have in the label, and finds the language alternative. The problem we currently have is that there are 3 different starting points, so there would also need to be three different translations.
OH… and as an English language only company, you can also apply your own “translations” if you like.
FYI… I did vote for “Draw ID” instead of Draw Num because not everyone has a NUMBER for their drawing… so ID would be more generic. (not to sway your opinion or anything).
yes, it is a character field… also only used by a subset of our customers who actually have drawings tied to their parts.
Someday, i would like to enhance the drawing tracking within Kinetic, but it is a lower priority item. Some customers have “Drawing Revisions” and a drawing table (UD for now) to hold all the drawing IDs… a drawing could actually apply to more than one part (often the case in the Fastener business).
Personally, I only use “ID” for system assigned things. I get your point, which is why I voted for the even more vague “drawing”. Similar to how “PartNum” is now just “Part” on the user facing screens.
Our company also tracks drawing rev, which may differ from the customer part rev, which is distinct from our own internal rev. So having “Drawing” and “Drawing Rev” parallels “Part” and “Part Rev” nicely.
EDIT: I also use ID to contrast with Description fields when I need a key field on something that people usually refer to by the description and that description may change. So, I’ve got a “program” (something that doesn’t quite exist in the Epicor architecture because it can span multiple customers) defined in a UD table. It has an ID, but also a description. Nobody cares what the ID is.
@timshuwy I agree that 99% of the time that ID is better than Num, but I think Part Number and Drawing Number are 2 places where the vast majority of people, both technical and the general population, would be more familiar with the term Number, even if it isn’t strictly numeric.
Tracking Number would be another example, even though all of UPS numbers start with 1Z
Chose Draw ID for consistency with other similar fields like Cust ID, and also potential future compatibility with a would-like-to-have Drawing table, where there could be a user entered Draw ID and a system managed unique Draw Num (like Customer, Vendor, etc.).
