If you want to move beyond buzzy business trends to the nuts and bolts of actual business improvement, then human understandable material master identities (descriptions, MPNs, specs) are necessary for real progress. For asset intensive industries including energy, pipelines, utilities and mining, digital transformation of the maintenance and supply chain business processes usually features improved integration of digital technical data packages for systems, equipment, and spare parts into core business processes. The value of tight linking of technical objects from systems down through spares is obvious. Much of the current […]
Conrad Greer
Has your Company applied an Identity Standard to its MRO material masters?
Your Maintenance Planners, Requisitioners, Buyers, Logisticians and Maintainers all interact with material masters to get their jobs done. If the identities of materials are not clear, your business slows, mistakes are made, business value is lost. MRO material master identities are the descriptions, manufacturer and vendor part numbers, and key specifications of your MRO materials. Having a unique human understandable identity for each MRO material is necessary for a well-run operation. Applying a cohesive identity taxonomy ensures uniqueness and prevents duplicates. If this was not important to your company in […]
MRO Materials: A rose by any other name is confusing
Being digital includes quality digital MRO material Identities. MRO business processes run in your ERP as the digital reality of MRO planning, execution, tracking processes and supply the data feed for work analytics. Yes, most have been doing these processes in big software for years. Isn’t digital transformation about new tech? Not if there are significant weaknesses that are fixable for a big improvement in business results. Ambiguous, indeterminate MRO material masters are a common weakness. Humans struggle to choose the right materials needed for their work. Digital thinking in […]
Are the MRO supply chains inside your enterprise out of tune, making bad music?
Talking MRO business processes, they are the SCM, Maintenance and Reliability processes that keep your productive assets producing. Business processes run on your ERP /CMMS and use material master records to represent the things to be consumed in running and fixing your plant. If the processes are “in tune”, it’s like they make music with harmony and flow. When not in tune, noise and friction happen. Processes slow, mistakes are made real business waste and loss happen. Indeterminate and poor material master identities are a central cause of detuned MRO […]
Improving the Human to System Interface for MRO Material Masters
There has been a weakness since the dawn of large business systems with MRO materials business processes. Simply stated MRO material or Item master records commonly have weak or indeterminate identities. This causes challenges and mistakes and is compounded by the creation of even more weak master records as a fix. There is a significant financial and performance cost to this problem. MRO materials are identified by their descriptions, manufacturers part numbers and material specification data (if recorded). Descriptions are commonly made ad hoc, MPNs are entered with inconsistent format […]
Achieving quality MRO material masters requires different knowledge than customer records
There is relevance in applying master data governance best practices to MRO material masters. The concepts are necessary, but not sufficient. Having quality MRO material masters requires incorporating the purpose or objective of the data object into a system that supports each record achieving its quality requirements. The purpose of each MRO material master is to represent a specific physical material in digital business system transactions to plan and track the material while leaving a digital usage trail for follow on analysis. A quality record uniquely identifies to humans using […]
The MRO Material Identity Problem in Oil & Gas
The oil industry has changed from a growth orientation to an effectiveness and efficiency focus. The just get it done no matter the cost mentality is now harmful. Doing things, the right way in a repeatable standardized fashion works. It is no longer OK to live with your materials related business processes run in a fog, difficult to find the right items to request, chronic over and understocks in the warehouse, weak analytical investigations due to fuzzy material masters, and chronic user frustration. The under-laying problem to all the issues […]
Fixing your MRO material catalogue is smart business
Operational efficiency improvement is the best approach when considering how to move forward from pandemic challenges. Reducing waste in your business processes is getting more from less. It helps now and it helps future application, technology and process upgrades by just making things work better easier. Poorly identified material masters in your MRO catalogue is an ongoing problem that slows procurement, inventory and maintenance processes while introducing errors and rework at every stage. This can be corrected by applying a structured MRO material identification taxonomy. A taxonomy that is tight […]
MRO parts and Enterprise Asset Mangement
The right time to identify the parts and materials needed to support an asset is during its design and build project. Particularly if you have maintenance strategies and a solid material identification taxonomy to apply. Sadly, for most assets, that ship sailed years ago, and we live with an MRO catalogue of very dubious value that is a constant drag on Maintenance, Operations and Supply Chain. The catalogue continues to expand with more items being added to support the same assets and getting worse over time. All is not lost. […]