Product Attributes with manufacturers ID

When shop owners order from manufacturers, often the individual product attributes are identified with their own product ID.

For instance:
123HAT = white hat
123HAT-RD = red hat
123HAT-BL = black hat

But Zen Cart only assigns the product ID to the parent product and an auto id to the product's attribute. When you're drop shipping hundreds of orders per day, this just doesn't work well. The only options are to make each product attribute its own product – totally not cool – or to try to manually hack out purchase orders to manufacturers by cross-referencing a catalog for their true product IDs.

It would be so much easier if Zen Cart just let you create a custom product id for each attribute.

Is there some add-on that allows you to do this?

Has anyone found how to complete this task? I also am looking for a way to put in model numbers for different attributes. Is there a way to add a field to the attribute?

I haven't used it, but I believe there is a "Stock By Attributes" module in the Free Add-ons section.

Thanks for the reply. I am currently running that mod in order to create dynamic drop down menus. As far as I can tell there is not a way to add a model number to an attribute, just a stock qty. I would love to hear that I am wrong however.