[kurthr]

Indeed, the challenge is storage of the information and immutability, since everyone needs to trust the database of unique IDs.

I hate to say it, but if you have connectivity (and directly connecting your production equipment to the internet seems foolish) then a distributed amongst manufacturers blockchain could provide the secure public database needed. It might be wise to batch the UIDs logged each shift to minimize contact and computation. Your test equipment (associated CPUs) could be searching for a new solution and separately upload the batch of UIDs each time it found one.