Hi,
Definig an Item, lots of work ahead unless you have not predefined and consulted with your: engineers, vendors, customers and internal SME and staff, sales and marketing and developers and the rest of your community.
then you need to embark on a PDM program that will analyze and strip the naming structure of your product. I recommend not to listen to the quick and dirty solutions, to the "how long can it possibly take to restructure the definitions?"you want to be careful, think like if you were to cross a mine field; be careful and listen all around you, the structure of the item description can slow down the operation of a company as the item cannot be found, or its duplicated or just plain a lot of pain to find it.
in the mean time have fun