WAWF: Why The Worlds of Contracts and Manufacturing are Colliding

Wide Area Work Flow (WAWF) is bringing two parts of the organization together that typically don’t interact with regularity: contracts and production.  UID or Item Unique Identification is the common thread.  More and more, contracts require that UID data is to be registered to the IUID Registry through WAWF.  The real challenge to this approach is getting the UID submission correct.  Many organizations use WAWF through the DoD provided web portal.  That portal provides for the submission of contract deliverables with UIDs.  The UID must be manually entered as part of that submission.  Imagine “hand-jamming” a string of alpha-numeric characters (e.g. D1TZJ4P9983100023623401BE410987) that will vary, sometimes drastically, hundreds of times as part of the submission process.  This not only poses risk to submitting incorrect UID data to the IUID Registry, which is very time consuming to correct, but as the government becomes better prepared to accept UIDs in their receipt and acceptance process, any inconsistencies between the data on the MIL STD 130N label on the item and what has been entered to the IUID Registry will become painfully obvious.  Shipments will be rejected and invoices will be held for payment.