A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

PLM Basics: Reference Designator and Find Numbers

PLM Basics: Reference Designator and Find Numbers
olegshilovitsky
olegshilovitsky
24 September, 2010 | 2 min for reading

Some time ago, one of my readers wrote me a comment with the question about Reference Designators and Find Numbers. With all our interest to talk about modern technological trends, mobile, social software, understanding and clarification of basics is very important too. In the past, I wrote few posts tagged PLM Basics. If you haven’t seen it before, navigate your brower to the following link.

Online Reference Information
You are pretty much out of lack if you are trying to find this information online. Here is short info from Wikipedia.

A reference designator unambiguously identifies a component in an electrical schematic (circuit diagram) or on a printed circuitboard (PCB). The reference designator usually consists of one or two letters followed by a number, e.g. R13, C1002. Thenumber is sometimes followed by a letter, indicating that components are grouped or matched with each other, e.g. R17A, R17B.

Another source of information, which is probably less known – PLMPedia. This is an online project of created byLEDAS. Unfortunately, PLMPedia has no information about what is a reference designator.

Reference Designator (RD)
RD is normally a text field that belongs to Component in Bill of Material, that helps you to specify what this component does and how to find this component. In most cases, used when more than one component with the same Part Number need to appear in BOM. Reference designators can be used in various reports and Bill of Material views. The most of Reference Designator usages is to simplify your access to a specific Component / Part Number. The usage of Reference designators can be different between various systems in the industry. Normally, the information about Reference Designator usage belongs to BOM module.

Find Number (FN)
FN is a number that usualy set by Bill of Material management module when create line item in BOM. For most cases, I’ve seen, Find Number usually set automatically or manually as the incremental number for every row in Bill of Material. Find Number is a simple way to search, sort and organize lines in Bill of Material module.

I found usage of Reference Designator sometimes overlaps with usage of Find Number. I’m looking forward to hearing about your experience and common practices. I didn’t find much online information about terms and practices in product development and engineering. The usage of Reference Designators can be different in electronic industry compared to mechanical engineering.

Best, Oleg

*** photo in this blog post was imported from Flickr user Dano. The original file is located here.

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
30 September, 2010

We are in the middle of a very interesting process of digitalizing our life. We are moving more and more...

27 January, 2021

Unless you lived under the rock for the last several years, you’ve heard about SaaSification. This funny term was changing...

3 February, 2014

My attention was caught this weekend by thedailybeast article with funny title – Why Big Data Doesn’t Live up to...

21 January, 2016

PLM was born as a solution for large companies. The complexity of enterprise product development, engineering, manufacturing and supply chain...

9 May, 2013

Enterprise software implementations are usually not a simple task. Compared to selection of your next mobile device and RSS reader,...

16 November, 2009

Reading over the weekend ZDNet post, “Why IT cannot seem to deliver measurable productivity”, I started to think about how...

13 December, 2018

Talk to many people about PLM and they tell you that process management is one of the key elements in...

9 May, 2014

I’ve been doing data management system for the last 20 years. The one thing you learn very fast – 3D...

25 April, 2013

Are you familiar with term “silo”. When it comes to enterprises and large organizations, we often can hear about different...

Blogroll

To the top