The easiest way is to not store that in your DB as a single object. It looks from here to be made up of 5 components:
1-
22-12-2011-
1
1/1/2012
Text
If you want to order results by any of these (or more probably by some combination of these) then I would store them as separate numeric and DateTime based values, and re-assemble the serial number when I needed it for presentation. Then it is a simple matter to use the Sql ORDER BY clause:
...ORDER BY manufactureDate, itemNumber ASC
Having it as one text field gives huge problems in sorting as you have to cope with the potential varying length on the 22-12-2011 part when it is early in the month, or the month is early in the year.