My Maglite torch {flashlight} has a serial number.
I recently bought an Energizer LED lantern, for almost exactly the same price as the Maglite. It does not have a serial number.
What motivates a manufacturer to assign serial numbers to its products, or not?
The main reason is trazability. It’s a matter of wanting to be able to identify the item’s history, from when was it made, to which specific components (serial numbers, batches) went into their making; in some cases, they do it because they know their clients will want to track the item’s after-purchase history. Nowadays most companies that want to track their machinery or parts will identify the machines with internal codes, but parts will use the manufacturer’s SN and having a machine identified both by internal code and SN is the kind of redundancy engineers love.
Sometimes, there’s a marketing factor: having had a boss and several clients who wanted to identify and/or individually track items ranging from tape meters to post-its (not the blocks, the individual post-its), never underestimate what the value of apparent trazability can do to improve your image of quality.
Traceability.
Oops.
Just a WAG, but don’t most products that have a ‘warranty’ also have a serial #?
I think a better answer is “maximum traceability.” A model number, common to many product samples, can serve well enough to trace where & when a product was made. This is used for food items; AFAIK, most food items don’t have a serial number for each package but a “model or batch number” that is sufficient to trace the source if needed.
It’s more processing to stamp a unique serial number on every single manufactured item compared to a batch number on thousands at once, so why do it if it serves little useful purpose?
is the item big enough to have a serial number on it? is the device valuable enough to a serial number marking device in the production line?
and traceability.
Model number is different from batch number, and different again from serial number.
Model number: A number that identifies a product line, like an HP Deskjet 1513 printer. It tells me nothing about when or where it was made, and if HP is manufacturing in different locations it wouldn’t tell them anything either.
Batch number: Identifies the batch that the product came from. Helpful in food industries, for example, since all the ingredients in that batch number are from the same pedigree. My can of soup has 06183 0138. It means nothing to me, but if it makes me ill the manufacturer will know how to recall similar product.
Serial number: A unique code that allows traceability of every single component in the item. Somewhere inside my phone is a serial number. Blackberry would be able to tell me when this phone was purchased, when it was activated, and to whom it belongs. (Plus they would know the batch number of ever component within the phone.)
At the risk of a hijack, traceability has on occasion backfired. There’s a famous case of German serial numbers that inadvertently helped the Allied war effort:
I seem to recall an episode of a US “police procedural” TV show that involved a hit-and-run driver being nailed because the driver didn’t realize that the car’s VIN was etched into the windshield of their car. They figured that as long as they got the windshield replaced soon enough they’d be home free and no-one could prove that the glass shards found at the crime scene were from their car.
Having and tracking serial numbers adds to the overhead for production so there needs to be a reason to implement it. Expensive products need to have them but really cheap ones don’t.
My WAG is that since Maglite has traditionally been a producer of upscale goods, the may tend to implement it more than Energizer which sells more things would traditionally not have serial numbers.
I had to switch my PO No. system after a vendor was able to estimate what percent of the jobs it was receiving.
I don’t think anyone’s explicitly said it, but by "traceability’ as a benefit I assume it means a couple different things;
As a side note, many networking products have a unique identifier, the MAC Address, buried in the circuitry. The same devices typically also have a separate Serial Number.
I used to work as a sales rep for a really small company that made some highly specialized products.
A customer had an issue with a new product that caused a lot of problems for his facility. It turned out to be a “known issue” but no one had informed the customer or myself of this. I was complaining to the factory about this and they were giving me song and dance about how “difficult” it was to make sure “everyone” got notified.
I pointed out that the serial number on the product in question was “2”
I know that GM engines have all major components marked by not only a serial number, but the exact time it was produced. So in case of a crankshaft, mgt knows when and who made a part.
I kinda like “trazability”. It has a nize ring to it.
A similar strategy is used for estimating wild animal populations.
Say you want to know how many tigers are in the jungle. So you go out and trap some tigers, and put numbered tags on them, then let them loose. Keep doing this for a while. Before too long, you will begin to notice that some of the tigers you trap already have tags. By analyzing their tag numbers, and also by noting the proportion of trapped tigers that already have tags over a certain time, you can make an estimate of the entire populations.
Researchers have done similar studies with humpback whales. Rather than tagging them, they take photographs of the underside of whales’ tails, which have black-and-white patterns that are unique like fingerprints.
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http://www.alaska-in-pictures.com/data/media/3/humpback-whale-fluke_6446.jpg
Then they look for pictures of the same whales seen again. By noting the proportion of repeat tails they see, they can get an estimate of the number of whales in the region.
It costs a lot of trouble to put serial numbers on things. So manufacturers are motifivated not to put serial numbers on things by cost.
Even a little paper sticker is an extra process step, but in fact, if you then want to get any benefit out of it, you also want to track who it was sold to, who tested it, and when and where it was manufactured.
In addition to traceability, there’s perceived value. Things which are numbered are, as already mentioned, often more expensive and better quality…which means that now putting a serial number, or what looks like a serial number, on an item makes people *think *it’s more expensive and of better quality, so they’ll pay more for it. Midlevel handbags often have serial numbers in them simply because expensive handbags have serial numbers in them. If you check the number, it’s not a true serial number: it’s the same number in every bag. But people *think *it’s a serial number, and so will pay more than they would for a handbag at Walmart.
This post brought to you by “It’s after 9PM and WhyNot is feeling cynical and should probably go to bed soon…”
I semi-randomize the invoice numbers for my side consulting for a similar reason.