It’s no secret that every maintenance
department has duplication within their Item Master. While some companies have
done a great job minimizing duplication through limited user input, strict operating
procedures and defined data standards, others have struggled to address the issue.
On average, we see duplicate items range from 15-20% within a given
manufacturing site, while the percentage of commonality across multi-site
organizations can sometimes range as high as 25-30%. Occupying a large portion of the MRO inventory
value, duplicate items present a major concern that silently leads to
inefficiency and unnecessary cost.
Cause of Duplication
As a common challenge that companies face, there
is no one person or thing at blame for duplication. Manufacturing
organizations often have multiple sites spread across large geographic regions,
each with thousands of MRO spare parts on hand to keep operations running. In
such large organizations, several different employees enter items into various software
systems at each site, with little or no standard guidelines, and often in
multiple languages. Over time, this lack of standardization causes materials
data to become inconsistent, inaccurate and incomplete, resulting in duplicated
information.
Effects of Duplication
Duplication can cost companies thousands, if
not millions of dollars in unnecessary maintenance expense. As the item master
becomes more and more polluted with duplicate information, equipment downtime
and maintenance costs begin to rise, parts cannot be located, false stock-outs
occur and maintenance workers scramble to expedite parts, meanwhile there is a
perfectly good part sitting on the storeroom shelf.
Solution for Duplication
The only solution to remove duplication from legacy
data is to implement a data cleansing project. During the cleansing process,
legacy data is cleansed, standardized and enhanced to maintain one consistent
format and nomenclature. As each unique item is cleansed, it is assigned a
Corporate Part Number, which links all items
into a “Virtual Warehouse”.
Once the data has been cleansed, standardized
and enhanced, duplicate items can then be identified by direct match and
fit-form-function similarity. Direct duplicates include two or more items
possessing the same manufacturer name, part number and description, whereas
fit-form-function duplicates include two or more items that possess different
manufacturer names and part numbers, but have the same description.
As duplicates are identified, the Corporate
Part Number from the original item is copied down to all of its duplicate
records. Using this Corporate Part Number, the duplicate items are now
identified and linked across the corporation. A file containing all identified
duplicates is then sent to the customer for verification and instruction.
From the sample above, you will notice that
the two records originally had different Stock Numbers and inconsistent
descriptions. After being identified as direct match duplicates, both records now
maintain one consistent description and corporate part number, while the old
item numbers remain in tact for future reference.
As always, data cleansing can deliver significant
cost savings and improved efficiency, especially when it comes to duplicate
identification. For more information on I.M.A. Ltd. and our services, visit www.imaltd.com or contact info@imaltd.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment