Jerry,
I've been kicking this around myself. Current thought coming out of the think tanks is to use a meaningless number to track your parts, rather than an intelligent number. Intelligent numbering schemes always break down due to the unanticipated myrid of exceptions that pour in. In the database game (my background is actually in the advanced business intelligence side of I.T. with data modeling and a smattering of engineering thrown in) creating intelligent keys has gone away for the more flexible method of abstract keys.
A big problem is when you have a part that is a member of a sub assembly, that is a member of another larger sub assembly..etc. You can end up with an unknown number of parent-child relationships. Intelligent numbering schemes work best when the level of relationships are strictly defined.
However, having said all of that intelligent numbering is compelling, and if you study the large manufactures they employ a combination of both methods (depending on the manufacturer).
As for the other issue of managing files, ajmoir's software development lifecycle (SDLC) example is a good one. What you need is a lifecycle management system. Have a look at what the bigger boy's are using to manage their environments. Features such as version control, project managment, issue management, etc are all features of these kind of systems. Look to the manufacturing industry rather than the software industry, it will be more tailored to your specific needs.
A change in paradigms is going on that aligns with this, with the introduction of Google's gmail, the emphasis is no longer on trying to categorize information, rather to search for it. Just as in your case, trying to walk through 10's of thousand of files and directories for just the right one is a headache, better to let the computer do it for you through a smart search (A single part can be stored too many different ways).
To aid this be sure you are verbose on your descriptions, this is what the search engine will rely on. BUT!!! again there are extremes even in this method, I prefer a middle of the road approach and keep all of my files grouped by project, within customer (regardless of what type of file it is). I consider myself as a customer as well. As for trying create a generic parts library or index of parts made and stored all over, that's were the searching comes in.
As a last item of caution BACKUP EVERYTHING. Computer will fail, and you can take that to the bank! I don't mean manually copying stuff to floppies, I mean make sure you keep you're data on a RAID system, if you use a laptop, setup offline files to your server (which has RAID drives setup), and have an offline system such as an internet backup service or tapes or something that will offline data automatically, etc.
Lastly a good virus scan product, I lost just about every file on my network drive once because of a virus that got through.
Best way to justify these kind of expenditures is to ask yourself - what would it do to my business if I lost all of my files (as what happened to me once).
Jay  |