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I was wondering if people here have their own ways of board numbering and how they keep a track of it? For e.g Unique Number-Revision Number-Board Description. I have used team centre in the past to create unique numbers for the boards I am working on and that worked in regards to keeping a track of each board. You could then freeze existing design and create a new revision and then this revision 2 would be called 12345/02 as an example and so on. I have also seen the use of an excel spreadsheet where each board is just one added increment to the previous board.

I would like to come up with a strategy where all the boards in my team have unique numbers which are easy to read and organise and can be used when listing a final product BOM.

Elliot Alderson
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Hasman404
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Good luck.

We are on our third iteration of both sourcefile management and versioning.

I'll also be following this thread, as I am curious to see what is done elsewhere.

Our experiences:

Schematic and PCB should have identical versions, such as 12345/01 and 12345/02 and so on. Even with fairly good soruce-control that adds confusion and uncertanty. The BOM needs additional versioning.

The BOM is, by far, the most dynamic and volatile document, it must be possible to adjust the BOM without changing multiple other documents. I know many of you, and even my some of my colleagues, disagree with me on this - "just do the legwork and ensure that all documents are up-to-date". But we have tried that, and failed. We have found that if it is "too complicated" to change the BOM, then minor changes still happen and you end up with 12345/02_old.pdf and 12345/02_use_this.pdf. That is an absolute nightmare.

Formalize changes to the BOM, such that 12345/02-A and 12345/02-B is based on the same PCB, but but with different BOMs. Then: Get the manufacturer to label the boards with the 12345/02-B identification.

Our ERP system is yelling loudly at us, but at least we know exactly what we built, even if we go back several years.

It ain't prefect, and we are a small company, so even the "use-this.pdf" worked.. sortof.. but don't do that.

Arcatus
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