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
Oleg
Oleg
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 by LEDAS. 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
22 March, 2016

Engineering.com article Winners and Losers When Industry Giant Bosch Consolidates CAD and PLM shed some lights on the recent announcement of...

21 August, 2022

Manufacturing companies are facing a digital transformation. They are looking to modernize their business processes and improve their operations. But...

19 August, 2009

I’m constantly looking for new technologies and perspectives of PLM improvement. For the last time, we discussed many products and...

11 March, 2014

For the last few years, I’ve been chatting about the opportunity to use Google infrastructure and tools to innovate in...

18 May, 2010

Technology and products are not always going together. What is the most fascinating to me is to see how technological...

9 July, 2012

I want to talk about the cloud today. However, I don’t want to speak about PLM cloud. I want to...

22 March, 2012

Let’s talk about Google today. I’ve been writing about Google technologies and Google enterprise efforts quite frequently. One of the...

14 June, 2010

I was reading HBR Blog post by Andrew McAfee “IT’s Three Key Organizational Transformations“. The issue of IT spending made...

13 July, 2025

Unless you’ve been off the grid, you probably saw the headline making waves in the engineering and construction software world:...

Blogroll

To the top