Defence UID
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Martin Baker Aircraft
The ‘UID’ program was initiated by the US Department of Defense in order to be able differentiate an individual item from all others and to provide better accountability, valuation and life cycle management for all items it takes title of.
Using 2D Data Matrix technology unique identification of items provides the Department the opportunity to:
- Improve the acquisition of equipment and performance based logistic services
- Capture accurate and reliable data on items for equipment, repairs and consumables
- Improve life cycle asset management
- Track items in the Department and industry systems for operational, logistic and financial accountability
As of 1st January 2004 any Company supplying, directly or indirectly, the DoD has had to comply with this mandate by establishing processes and applying a UII ‘Unique Item Identifier’ on items.
The US DoD requires that accountability records be established for all property, plant and equipment with a unit acquisition cost of $5,000 or more, and items that are sensitive or classified, or items furnished to third parties, regardless of acquisition cost. Property records and/or systems are to provide a complete trail of all transactions, suitable for audit.
A delivered item to the DoD may be composed of embedded items, such as subassemblies, components or parts. The complete item will have one ‘UII’ "Unique Item Identifier" but the prime will have to manage and deliver a list of all the UIIs that make up the complete item. Similarly suppliers to the prime have to manage all the UIIs for their subassemblies, components or parts.
An alternative commercial identifier can be used for use as a DoD IUID equivalent if it meets these strict criteria:
- it contains an enterprise identifier
- it uniquely identifies an item within an enterprise identifier, product or part, lot or batch number
- it must have an existing Data Identifier ‘DI’ or Application identifier ‘AI’ listed in ANSI MH10.8.2, Data Identifier and Application Identifier
The DoD recognise four commercial unique identifiers that comply:
- EAN.UCC Global Asset Identifier ‘GIAI’ for serially managed items
- EAN.UCC Global Returnable Asset Identifier ‘GRAI’ for returnable assets
- ISO Vehicle Identification Number ‘VIN’ for vehicles
- Electronic Serial Number ‘ESN’ for mobile phones
UID Data Elements
The generic term UII, has evolved through usage to mean the concatenated UII as a common data base key without regard to the data set construct being used.
A DoD UII Data Set is a set of data elements marked on an item that is globally unique and unambiguous. For items that are serialised within the enterprise identifier, the UII data set includes the data elements of enterprise identifier and a unique serial number (Construct #1).
For items that are serialised within the part, lot or batch number within the enterprise identifier, the UII data set includes the data elements of enterprise identifier, the original part, lot or batch number, and the serial number in this order (Construct #2)
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Enterprise | An Enterprise is the entity responsible for assigning the UII to an item. An enterprise identifier will define each entity location that has its own unique, separate and distinct operation and could be a manufacturer, supplier, branch, program management office or a third party. |
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Enterprise Identifier | An enterprise identifier is a code uniquely assigned to an enterprise by a registered ‘IAC’ Issuing Agency such as DUNS, UCC/EAN, CAGE, DoDACC or ANSI. It is not mandatory to mark the IAC on the item. |
The UII data elements, as a minimum, shall be contained in an ECC200 Data Matrix symbol encoded to ISO/IEC 15434 and using the semantics in ISO/IEC 15418 or ATA Common Support Data Dictionary (CSDD). The data may be coded in other media such as linear barcodes of RFID tags but this will be in addition to Data Matrix.
The UII is to be marked on the item by either labels or Direct Part Marking.
Business Rule for Construct #2
The concatenated UII is a non-parsable field, not to exceed 78 characters in length. Overhead characters, such as syntax and data qualifiers, are eliminated from the string when the concatenated UII is constructed.
- The IAC string of characters will not exceed 3 characters
- The enterprise identifier will not exceed 13 characters, excluding the data qualifier
- The original part, lot or batch number of string characters (including special characters) will not exceed 32 characters, excluding the data qualifier
- The serial number (including special characters) will not exceed 30 characters, excluding the data qualifier
- The maximum number of characters is 78. The use of shorter fields is encouraged where feasible.
When constructing the concatenated UII:
- Any spaces in the component data elements will be deleted
- All special characters will be deleted from the enterprise identifier
- All special characters, except for dashes (-) and forward slashes (/) will be deleted from the original part and serial number
- The concatenated UII may only contain uppercase English characters A through to Z, numeric characters 0 through to 9, and the special characters "-" and "/".