Has the value of your MRO inventory been growing for years?

Do you get Finance pressure to control your use of working capital funds?

All would likely be well if your Maintenance colleagues were singing your praises for excellent MRO material support. Unfortunately, Maintenance grievances about parts non-availability is as common as growing MRO inventory values.

We have a dilemma, if our SCM MRO objective is to maximize effective material support to Operations & Maintenance at the minimum cost (including use of working capital to stock needed items). We’re often significantly sub-par on both measures.

What drives this?

Non-moving or dead stock is the heart of the matter.

The MRO warehouse is a place that yesterday’s mistakes live on a shelf forever. But non-moving stock was not a mistake when it was bought. The randomness of item identities are problematic for future requesters. The core issue is poor data quality for MRO item identities.

To be useful in our MRO processes, each record needs an identity that is:

> Structured – regular users quickly become familiar with the nouns, the attributes used and the order they appear. They can find what they are looking for. Contrast that to the common description standard, “call it what the requester wants, they’re the expert”. Too many cooks in the kitchen, too much randomness, too much confusion.

> Comparable – This requirement is for MRO catalogue governance, not end user search. We want a catalogue with one record only for each real-world item we need. Effective item comparability requires comparing all identity attributes, not just MPNs that can be entered in many formats or excluded.

An MRO item identity standard that defines the attributes for each mutually exclusive noun class is needed to achieve quality identities that are structured and comparable. When a user searches, they should get to a single answer, not 5 or 20.

Too often, when frustrated by a challenging item search, a new item was created. The stock of the not found item tends not to get used again. Our MRO catalogue looks like layers of sedimentary rock. The deeper or inner layers represent yesterday’s records and today’s dead stock. This has gone on for years and passed through system Go-Lives and mergers. It’s a data quality problem that needs useful data quality rules to be fixed.

MRO material identity is a fixable problem with great economic return.

Let’s discuss your MRO

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