posted 9 years ago
It depends on the industry. Generally it's preferable to have the application generate the SKU numbers, but the decision to use, say, the UPC or ISBN as the "SKU number" might also be made in some cases. That's because those identifiers are supposed to uniquely identify a product.
However if you don't have industry-specific requirements, I would suggest having your application generate the SKU numbers. Even in those industries where you do have allegedly unique identifiers, I would still recommend having an application-generated SKU number. "Unique" numbers have a bad habit of occasionally being not completely unique.