Weak identification of MRO material masters is the root cause of poorly performing MRO catalogues in ERP and CMMS systems. Weak identities cause the pain here. A poor MRO catalogue makes every business process using material masters perform worse with more cost, risk, mistakes, confusion and frustration.
End users, be they Maintenance Planners, Buyers, Technicians, Warehouse staff should not be challenged with deciding which of many possible similar items is the correct one for their need. Having an MRO catalogue with only one record representing each real-world item needed is a Data Governance responsibility. The catalogue should be right and items searchable when end users use it. A standard that makes identities structured and comparable needs to be applied to make the catalogue rational.
If material master records cannot be sufficiently compared to each other, they all appear to be unique distinct records that belong in the database. They remain to cause chaos in work processes. Many companies have weak item description standards (just start with a noun or call it what the requester wants are examples), they do not store key material specifications for records where that is important and have no standard for which types of items need manufacturer and manufacturer part number (MPN) stored. With lax identification standards many unnecessary and or indeterminate records are added to the system in merger events, new capital projects, and through individual item requests over time. It’s common to have 20 to 50% more MRO item records than real-world items needed to operate and maintain assets.
The issue is made worse by the standard duplicate checking method of comparing MPNs. This is a relatively weak duplicate test for two reasons. First, there are broad swaths of MRO materials that are not appropriate to store MPNs, so they never get duplicate checked because the field is null. Second, the MPN field values are notorious for low quality in legacy data records, so using them alone to find duplicates is weak. Issues with MPN quality include fields not populated, manual data entry errors that make records appear unique, superseded MPNs, as well as potential different values entered for OEM, OPM, or Vendor part numbers.
Without structured identity templates for each noun class of MRO item, description attributes are not comparable. This leaves only the weak MPN comparison method to try and find duplicates.
What is needed is an MRO Material Identification Standard that shows the nouns we use and which synonyms map to them, which attributes and which order we will put them in our descriptions, which key specifications need to be recorded and which items need manufacturer and MPN recorded. If we store consistent structured information on items, then we can make robust comparisons and solve the clutter and confusion in the MRO catalogue. This enables end user success by reducing errors, overstocks, stock outs, unnecessary spend, job delays, material expediting, and making MRO work move faster.