Standards Dictionary

Organisations having diverse support inventories of raw materials, operating supplies and spare parts for equipments,  require a disciplined approach to collecting and recording inventory information in order to obtain optimum control over the inventory.

Without effective control over the inventory there is a tendency for it to grow beyond the organisations true needs through duplication and lack of standardisation.  This gives rise to significant increases in capital expenditure and associated operating overheads such as warehousing, purchasing and inventory control.

In the early 1950's, the US Defence Department recognised that it had such a problem.  It was also concerned that differing information standards inhibited effective communication between the various forces.  They subsequently designed and implemented a centralised supply catalogue system.

To ensure a consistent approach to recording the information it was necessary to create a series of standards and disciplines.  These included:

   Dictionary of Item Names
    Commodity Classification System
    Descriptive Patterns
    Manufacturers and Suppliers Codes
    Standard descriptive abbreviations
    Standard descriptive encoding rules

In the early 1960's, the Australian Defence Forces acknowledged the same problems the Americans had and decided to adopt the same basic standards so as to eliminate extensive research and development.

In adopting the US Dictionary of Item Names however, the Australian's  discovered that it was necessary to establish a local (Australian) supplement due to differing style conventions. 

ADIN, the predecessor of the Oniqua Standards Dictionary was created in 1982 in response to commercial stimuli.  At that time, a large number of organisations, both private and public, had made a policy decision to apply standard inventory naming within their supply systems.  Unfortunately, NATO standards were cumbersome to use due to the US and Australian versions.

The AUSLANG (AUSTRALIAN SUPPLY LANGUAGE) programme was created in 1978 by the Australian government to improve the quality of inventory information recording systems and in turn reduce the amount of capital investment in support inventories within non-Defence government and industry within Australia.  One of the primary AUSLANG objectives was to "promote the use of one set of guides and disciplines to achieve a national common supply language". In line with this objective, it was decided to consolidate the two Defence dictionaries, and their supplements, into the one database.

This database was developed to accommodate not only the original dictionaries but also industry related information.  The mining industry in Australia was at that time the furthest advanced in terms of inventory management systems and had been applying the Defence dictionary names to their inventories. They found that whilst those dictionaries were able to satisfy most of their naming needs, there was a need to augment the dictionary with additional names for items not used within the Defence environment.  In addition, some names were considered unsuitable for the Australian industrial environment and therefore wished to establish substitute names for use within their industry sector.  Furthermore, they saw little value in having names for which they had no interest, like guided missiles, nuclear ordnance, etc.

The Oniqua Standard provides the flexibility to publish a dictionary specifically tailored to the needs of Australian industry.

The Oniqua Standards Dictionary (OSD) is available on an subscription basis.  It is provided as a CD however is moving to a web based application in 2009.  The CD publication will be updated regularly until it is phased out late in 2009. This  web version will be updated as soon as changes are made

Currently there are more than 250 organisations using OSD or one of its subsets as a naming standard within their inventory information systems.  They include organisations in the United States, Arab Emirates, Thailand, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and Australia and are represented across a diverse range of industries. 

OSD owes its heritage to the Auslang standards – a widely acclaimed implementation of NATO cataloging principles which has been refined over more than twenty years to meet the needs of asset-intensive industries.

Oniqua acquired the Auslang business in 2004.