GAO Report on UID Progress

The GAO (General Accounting Office) recently released a report on the IUID Program and has made suggestions of areas in need of improvement.

Check out the full report here.

One item that will be of interest to our Defense Contractor customers is that the GAO asks the DoD to do a better job of putting the IUID clauses in contract and making sure that they are completed correctly. A lot of our customers have been confused by the contract IUII requirements – the process could work much more smoothly if the requirements were better explained on a lot of contracts.

At the end of the report, are nine recommendations made by GAO, along with the DoD responses to them. Recommendation 5 is interesting because in the response, DoD talks about how the DCMA is charged with reviewing the IUID requirements with the contractor and ensuring that the marking on the parts meets the standards.

One amusing point in the report is that the photograph of a dataplate (Figure 1 in the report) seems to have an incorrectly formatted Datamatrix barcode – please don’t use it as an example of how to construct a UID.

Are you a DoD contractor? How have you been doing with the MIL-STD-130 IUID rules?

Thanks to the nice folks at A2B Tracking for the heads up on this.