Crazy Product Numbers

Back in the early days of Bridal Gems we had only a few dozen products and decided at the time to give them item numbers based on the type of product. Because there were so few products, we numbered them in 10's so tiaras were coded T10, T20, T30 and so on and necklaces sets N10, N20 etc. This worked fine until the number of products reached hundreds, and when we coupled with that the fact that even discontinued items still had to have codes allocated, we soon started to run out of codes. We then started to use the numbers in between the 10's but this brought up altogether new problems. Our stock control was getting difficult because it was hard to decide on the correct code for a new product and picking orders started to become confusing as 'N' and 'T' or any of the other product prefixes could easily be mixed up and customers understandable wouldn't be to happy receiving a really pretty necklace when they ordered a tiara.
So the solution was unfortunately obvious, we had to re-code our entire stock and implement a system for new products that will last well into the future. Our old system although flawed in some ways, did work very well at the beginning, and a new version of this system is what we decided to use. We'll still be prefixing the number with a letter representing the product type, and so as not to get mixed up with old codes we're starting with T1001, T1002 etc for tiaras and to help avoid the picking errors we decided to start necklaces at N2001, and earrings at E3001 and so on.
With 1000's products in our database, the task of re-coding and making sure all reference to the old coding system are changed is quite a big one. We've had to work really fast as the worst possible situation is to have two different systems on the go at one time, as of today all reference to the old codes should have disappeared, the only exception is a few items listed on eBay which can't be change until the auctions finish. Just to be safe, and because we realise there might well be parts of the site we've missed, we have kept an old code label in our warehouse on all products and plan to keep them in case of future confusion.