MRO Data Cleansing Service
Turn dirty, unstructured maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) legacy data into complete, consistent and comparable business-ready data.
With Sphera MRO Data Cleansing Service, You Can Improve Your MRO-Related Business Process Effectiveness
Sphera’s MRO Data Cleansing Service is the best in the world in terms of quality, schedule and cost. We offer services for large and small projects, as well as “steady state.” This involves MRO master data provisioned per your terms and your desired data standards, to be cleansed as a weekly or monthly service.
We have customers with multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and hundreds of plants in dozens of countries operating in many languages and encompassing a million parts. We also serve customers with a single ERP covering 10,000 parts in one language.
Why Dirty Data Can Harm Your Organization
In many asset-intensive organizations, data is entered into business systems in a variety of ways: unstructured, in “free form,” without governance and with no data standards. This results in MRO parts and material master data descriptions that are incomplete, inconsistent, noncomparable and not business-ready.
Such dirty or “toxic” data can be the root cause of many types of business process execution inefficiencies and delays. Resource redundancies and unavailability of parts increase operational risk. In supply chain and maintenance, the consequences of dirty data include:
Unintentional duplicate parts causing excess inventory and a lack of visibility across plants.
Limited visibility of inventory and material for working capital use and spend analytics.
Continued ordering and warehousing of obsolete parts and an inability to identify such parts.
Longer order fulfillment times arising from poor item descriptions, which can lead to stock-outs.
Delays in planned and unplanned maintenance when mislabeled parts cannot be located, which causes unplanned downtime.
An inability to optimize sourcing, procurement and contracts or to minimize unnecessary spending.
Excessive time spent trying to clean data or fix transactions that have been poorly executed.
Benefits of Complete, Consistent and Comparable Data
Through data cleansing services, also called data cleaning or data scrubbing, businesses can optimize their data. Having clean, standardized and structured data helps companies manage inventory efficiently, lower costs and increase productivity, all positive for the bottom line. Organizations realize cost benefits that include:
Inventory and warehouse space optimization.
Working capital reduction.
The avoidance of critical part stock-outs that stop work, extend unplanned downtime and cause lost sales due to reduced production output.
Improvement in effective technician “wrench time” availability when parts are found easily and quickly.
Supplier and supply chain optimization. Transparency and aggregation of buying patterns give procurement an advantage in price negotiations. Buyers are also able to leverage spending power in contracts via supply consolidation.
Efficient searches through informative descriptions and characteristics.
Optimization of maintenance, procurement, sourcing and other business processes.
Correct, consistent and comparable data generates cost savings and a competitive edge, particularly in the areas of MRO, procurement and supply chain.
Evaluating Your MRO Data Status Quo
Sphera provides an MRO master data “health check”—our MRO Material Master Assessment (MMA)—to quickly assess the condition and quality of your organization’s data and the probable impacts to your business. The purpose is to:
- Determine the condition of your existing database (completeness, consistency and correctness).
- Identify the current business practices that are systems-reliant upon this data.
- Understand current and future plans for relevant business practices and identify dependencies on data, as well as opportunities for improvement.
Once Sphera has performed an MMA, companies receive an estimate of the extent of the effort that is needed for effective data cleansing. Our experts also make recommendations for improving and maintaining your data.
Identifying Improvement Areas, Developing New Processes
Sphera experts conduct qualitative and quantitative analyses and report on the structure and content of your organization’s data. We perform industry-specific and overall statistical analysis including:
- Consistent use of nomenclature, descriptions and standards in your data across plants, across ERP systems and for parts within the same class or noun.
- Occurrences of duplicates or near-duplicates.
- Data validation for units of measure and data enrichment from trusted URLs.
- Use of codes, part numbers, material types, inventory data, plant data, sourcing data, reliability data and other identifying reference numbers and information, including OEM part information.
If within the scope of the project, Sphera experts will advise you on ways to improve your data integrity. Additionally, they will develop scenarios for improving existing data governance practices including organizational data governance models and approaches.
Your organization can incorporate the recommendations into your current business practices or use them to develop new processes and enhance existing systems. Areas for potential cost avoidance will also be identified and discussed.
Our expertise is based on 30+ years of data management and data cleaning experience, including service master cleaning. Sphera has developed world-class practices and processes. We follow industry-standard “best practices” for data normalization, data optimization and governance for complete, clean, classified, standardized and enhanced MRO data.
Best-in-Class Standard Modifier Dictionary (SMD) and Data Management
Sphera’s industry-leading Standard Modifier Dictionary (SMD) is the foundation on which the data is cleansed, standardized, normalized, harmonized, duplicate-checked and enriched.
The SMD was created expressly for MRO materials, parts and equipment records, as well as service masters. Our Sphera SMD contains thousands of MRO templates based on unique nouns, modifiers, qualifiers and technical characteristics.
The first version was created in 1978 by Intermat, which was later acquired by IHS. Now SMD is owned and continuously improved by Sphera. With 45 years of pedigree and history, Sphera SMD is likely the single most widely utilized and the best MRO taxonomy and technical dictionary in the world.
How to Provide Data to Sphera for a Material Master Assessment
For a Material Master Assessment or a data cleansing project, we provide instructions on how to extract your data from your legacy system(s). Data can be sent to us as Microsoft Access, Excel or tab-delineated text files with associated file layouts. If you are currently using a Sphera product (such as Struxure®), please provide a backup of your current database.
Sphera will provide your organization with specific instructions on how to upload your cleansed data. We recommend our mutual non-disclosure agreement (NDA), if required. Our process is ISO-9001 certified.
Explore Other Capabilities
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Master Data Management
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Are you ready to harness the real power of your data?
Learn what Sphera’s Master Data Management software can do for your enterprise.