UID Marking and Its Importance to the UID Registry

About UID
As per The Department of Defense (DoD) mandate, Unique Identification or UID is a must for all Government furnished tangible assets. UID is an initiative program devised by the DoD to access information about all defense related and embedded items. Through UID, it’s easier and faster to keep track of acquisition, repair, and deployment of the military items. The UID labeling and marking is a part of DoD’s serialization tracking programs (SNTs). The UID Labels, UID nameplates and UID tags are required to withstand the rough climatic condition to be UID compliant.

Department of Defense has clearly mentioned which items would meet UID registration standards. Those items, for which the Government’s unit acquisition cost is $5,000 or more, are required to be marked by UID. Several types of materials are used for UID labels. Polyester, stainless steel, aluminum and even laser marked Tessa tapes are used for the labels. Of the several types of UID labels, Polyester bar code UID labels, Metal bar code UID labels, Ceramic-Steel UID nameplates and Foil bar code UID labels are more popular for their robustness and longevity. With the advent of many online stores, now UID Tags and Labels can be customized as per the requirement. However, these materials ought to meet the MIL STD 130 code standards.

The UID marking process involves all info about an item to be written in a 2D-datamatrix code. Starting from serialized item number, part number, batch or log number, CAGE Code, to manufacturing details; everything is included in the this 2dimensional data matrix code.

Submission to the UID registry

Before registering with the UID registry, all the government manufacturing units as well as commercial manufacturers are mandated to be registered with Central Contractor Registration system (CRR). If you are a government employee or a Government Contractor, then the DoD Program Manager will provide you login access rights to the UID registry. All other users must register themselves and only after they are provided with login credentials they can access the Controlled Access portion of the UID Registry.

While submitting to the UID registry, contractors should take care of the following things. Apart from item number, part number and log number; item description should be included. Information about initial acquisition and major modification if any should also be emphasized. Besides this, accountability information such as Contractor custody information and acceptance data has to be present. Also detailed shipment and delivery information containing the acquisition contract info has to be present in the list of data.

Now the Department of Defense has facilitated the UID shipment data to be submitted via wide area workflow (WAWF) method. With WAWF, DoD has initiated technologically advanced method of data submission to the UID registry. A paperless contracting environment, WAWF helps contractors to transmit data electronically. Contract receipt can also be acquired electronically. When the data is submitted through WAWF, the UID registry is updated automatically. One major benefit of submitting through WAWF is, now contractors can receive their approval details in a comparatively less number of days than earlier.