Says the designer : "I have a piece of equipment for product 12345. It is built with assemblies for that product, these assemblies and their drawings have numbers like 12345-01, 12345-02, ... and there is no discussion about that. It makes is easy to search and order drawings and product specific assemblies that are actually delivered to the client. Some parts in these assemblies are some reused library models with a sequential number, other parts are now designed for this product and are therefore also numbered like 12345-01-01, -01-02, ... a postfix that actually represents the index in the drawing BOM."
Says the production department : "Great, that number shows us where these parts have to go to.", and in a way, he's right.
Says the designer that wants to copy that product models : "Great, I can visually see what numbers are product specific, which is easy to replace with a new product number during a Save a Copy."
Off course, we end up with errors. Sometimes the repeat region index wasn't fixed, so part 01 ends up at index 05. Sometimes a part is discarded and a new part replacing it should have the same number. Quite an administrative task to fix this. Sometimes a part is not necessary in a copied model, so suddenly part 04 doesn't exist. That's why there is only a short-term benefit to intelligent numbering. On the long term, we need to reuse more parts and need to avoid all the possible errors that can be caused by that intelligent numbering.