Patent Document ID: 20090282018
Application ID: 12117033
Patent Status: 0

Claim One:
1. A method of searching for customer part numbers stored in an enterprise database, comprising: identifying any matches between supplier part numbers of a set of supplier part numbers and the customer part numbers; creating a set of discrete search strings for each of the supplier part numbers by which a search of the customer part numbers is performed; identifying any exact matches and non-exact matches between the discrete search strings and the customer part numbers from an output of the search, each non-exact match being characterized by a match of each alpha-numeric character of one of the search strings with a subset of each alpha-numeric character of one of the customer part numbers; determining a maximum length of a search string used to identify each of the non-exact matches; and identifying supplier part numbers that are further non-exact matches with respect to the customer part numbers based on the maximum search string length but which could not have been used to identify the customer part numbers