Huge thanks to everyone who has commented! There are a lot of good suggestions and also some questions which I will do my best to work through.

The serial numbers are used on a piece of equipment that we source from an external company and deploy to engineers. We don't have any control over serial number generation and I don't know if there is any correlation between the core serial and the check digit.

My initial issue stems from the fact that since 2018, different people/departments have received, built, and added to, the various files using different formats of the serial numbers. This is likely what has caused issues such as duplicate entries and incorrect formats (Like the 13 digit version 2). It's a "Too many cooks spoil the broth" scenario which I have now been tasked with trying to fix. Going forward we want to implement unit tracking using any of the possible formats so a database looks like the right way to go.

Check digits are only over in the range 0-9.

Month numbers are 01 - 12 but as is apparent in our data, some entries miss the leading zero off of single digit months.

I'm going to go ahead and try some of the suggested solutions as the logic appears to be quite straight forward.


In reply to Re: Merging multiple variations of a serial number by Doozer
in thread Merging multiple variations of a serial number by Doozer

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