I’m making the SKU format public so that I don’t forget, and I’m forced to stick to it.
Overall, it should provide an acceptable amount of info both for the warehouse personnel and the end user, while being as short as practical. Take the below example:
A0001-DVBMCR-ProMini5V
I made it up just now, but it looks not too shabby and it’s not a barcode.
SKU Format Scheme
A – Not concrete at the moment. For now, it’s a size parameter that sets expectations for the people in charge of the stock.
- A – Very small, on the order of ICs or small modules (e.g. Arduino Pro Mini)
- B – Small, on the order of development boards (RPi, Arduino Uno)
- C – Medium, on the order of PC motherboards to full PC towers
- D – Large, on the order of home appliances
- E – Very large, needing a truck to haul
0001 – Shelf, Row, Column, Item Number (in case a “bin” contains multiple items). 0-9 A-Z.
After the initial inventory organizer, informational data is added in for sanity checks. Usual warehouse personnel would only ever need to handle the first part, but it helps everyone to know what “B23A5” is.
DVBMCR – Development Boards, Microcontrollers. A broad overview of what the item is. Usually formed as a shorthand of the actual words or component nomenclature. For example, INCXTL might be Integrated Circuit > Crystal Oscillator, and SNSTMP as Sensor > Temperature, or just MOTORS since it directly says what it is.
ProMini5V – Directly names the item, kept as brief as possible. This refers to the Arduino Pro Mini 5V 16MHz. Another example is RPi3Bp, short for Raspberry Pi 3B+.
The SKU shall not exceed 30 characters overall. For now, there’s 2 hyphens and the initial header is 5 characters long, so that leaves 23 characters for informational stuff.
The SKU format is going to be like this for the foreseeable future. However, It may change if desperately needed, say in #expansion.