Item revision rules

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Parts are not stocked by revision
The debate, for some reason, continues to rage: do parts have revisions?
The obvious answer is, yes, of course, parts get revised all the time. And there is certainly no
harm in marking the revision on the part if you want to trace a particular iteration to a specific
drawing revision.
But the real part revision question goes to interchangeability, which drags in the old "form, fit
and function" discussion.
A part number is, for all practical purposes, both
an item identifier, and
a location in the warehouse for that item.
From the perspective of those people who work with the real-life physical part, the part number
is used to consolidate all interchangeable parts at one warehouse location. A part received into
inventory will be stocked in a location identified only the part number. If you need to stock a
new iteration of a part in a different bin because it is not compatible with previous iterations,
then you issue a new part number, not a revision.
Many ERP systems can only track, manage and purchase parts by number. Sometimes, in order
to sidestep this "limitation", users will add the revision as a suffix to the ERP part number,
thereby forcing the system to order, receive and stock by revision. This approach merely creates
a new part number where every revision, interchangeable or not, has its own inventory bin.
Revisions are not used to reflect design confidence
In the old days, a design that wasn't yet approved for production had a numeric revision (e.g.,
"01"), and when it was production-ready it was assigned an alphabetic revision (typically "A" or
"AA"). The revision format communicated a business rule whether it was safe to buy an item in
production quantities.
These "intelligent" revision formats could distinguish 2 lifecycle phases, but there are typically
not just two sets of business rules. At various phases, you may want to say "don't buy any, we're
still working" (design), "buy only enough to do a field test" (beta), "stock only enough to support
repairs" (service-only), or "this is no longer stocked" (obsolete).
You probably would not propose having different revision formats for each lifecycle phase, even
though a revision production-oriented revision "C" may represent "build whatever you need"
(production) or "don't build any" (obsolete). Instead, most PLM systems support an unlimited
number of lifecycle phases to reflect your organization's inventory business rules.
So in a modern PLM system, the simple "preproduction" versus "production" revision formats
cannot indicate the true business rules currently applicable to the item.
Furthermore, embedding the lifecycle phase in the revision forces the item owner to open the
file, edit the revision value, and ensure that nothing else will be modified, by intention or
accident.
Consider instead:
Document revision refers to the technical content of the document. You change the
revision only to change its contents.
Lifecycle phase refers to a set of business rules that are applied to the document.
An item's lifecycle phase should be a simple database attribute that represents a company's
commitment to the item, a reflection of the item's "maturity". One should not revise a document
if the document itself has not changed, but its usage has.
Item revisions use letters or numbers, but not both
An alphanumeric revision is not necessary, and can be confusing. Is the revision after "A9"
supposed to be "A10" or "B1" (or "B0")? Even if you and your colleagues know, have your
suppliers trained each of their staff?
The argument in favor of using alpha characters for a revision beyond the historical fact that
DOD/MIL-STD-100 required it is that "it's different from an item number" and therefore
easily distinguished, assuming that your item numbers are numeric. You may be able to set your
computer system to accept only numbers for identifiers and only letters for revisions.
On the other hand, numeric characters offer a more visually distinct set; most people can easily
identify the digits 0 through 9 regardless of handwriting style or computer typeface. It's often
more difficult to distinguish C/G, D/O/Q, L/I, U/V/Y, or W from VV.
Revisions are a fixed length
Ideally, your items should always display their entire "potential" revision sequence, such as
"AA" or "001"; users will then be able to tell if a character has been omitted or accidentally
truncated. If some of your revisions are "A" and others are "AC", how is a reader to know
whether the first revision is correct, or is missing the second character?
Dates are not appropriate for item revisions
Because it's possible that an item could be revised more than once on a single day or are effective
across more than one time zone, and dates are notoriously prone to misinterpretation based on
the reader's geographic location (is "03.06.05" in March or June or maybe May?), you
shouldn't consider a date for a revision.