Asset intensive industries maintain catalogues of Maintenance Repair & Operations materials in their business system. The materials are digital twin records of the spares and supplies used to operate and maintain their productive assets. Ideally there is one record for each unique MRO item needed.

In the real world, too often multiple records exist to represent specific materials. The excess records are referred to as duplicates and getting rid of them is valuable. Value improvement is observed in every MRO material business process from job planning and execution to warehouse operations, to sourcing, and reliability. Fixing the problem has a very high return if the method used works, and a waste of effort if no real improvement occurs.

Typically, direct comparison yields few matches. The descriptions were created without reference to a common taxonomy, often key specifications are not recorded in classification, the hopeful cross reference of Manufacturer Part Number is diminished by weak format standardization (not to mention the significant percentage of MRO items that are non MPN types)

The duplicate problem is more of a not comparable problem.

The solution is to normalize the identity elements of each material master, then do duplicate matching.

My company, SPC Results recommends applying a structured identification taxonomy to support de-duplication. We can guide you to reducing waste in all your MRO business processes caused by indeterminate MRO material masters.

#masterdata #operationalexcellence #maintenancemanagement #SCM #SAP