Take Advantage of ORM Partners’ Business Analytics Solution
Most business enterprises typically put their energy, resources and investment into things like product design, sales and marketing, production efficiency, tight process control, information technology, and supply-chain management both for inbound flows of direct materials and outbound flows of finished goods to end customers.
With so many important priorities vying for attention, managing a company’s MRO supply chain has typically been quite neglected.
Consider, for a moment, the case of a manufacturing company that has never had a process in place to control when, how or by whom materials item and supplier masters get created for MRO goods in ERP.
Think about:
- The number of plants the company might be operating
- The geographic (and linguistic) sprawl of its plants
- The number of machines operating in the plants
- The number of moving parts within the machines
- The number of years in which the machines have been operating
- The number of different people who — over those years — have been called to service or repair the machines and purchase replacement parts for them
- The sheer quantity and variety of consumable MRO items that get used every day in operations
- The number of different suppliers that provide those consumable MRO items
- The number of mergers or acquisitions the company is likely to have gone through over the years
Very quickly, one gets a picture of the vast duplication, misclassification, inconsistency and inaccuracy that permeates typical industrial enterprises’ ERP ecosystems related to MRO. And the MRO data problem sits at the root of a large host of challenges that stand between industrial companies and optimized MRO supply chains.
Taxonomy Free MRO
Taxonomy is simply a way of categorizing information into small buckets, that roll up into bigger buckets, that roll up into even bigger buckets.
It has implications for the following:
- Search — the ability to easily locate specific MRO items in inventory.
- Reporting and analysis — the gaining enterprise-level and detailed views into such things as MRO spending, consumption patterns and inventory.
Having no discernible taxonomy forces search and analysis activities into labor intensity and failure, simple, high-level taxonomies may help somewhat with search, but leave detailed drilldown type analyses virtually impossible to accomplish without ad hoc manual or external classification exercises. Using a proprietary taxonomy is better than no taxonomy, but with a standard, rich classifcation taxonomy like UNSPSC already dominating in other areas like spend analysis and B2B e-commerce transactions, developing and maintaining proprietary taxonomies is wasteful of resources and precludes important integration of information among functions.
Free-For-All ERP Access
What you get (for starters) is massive duplication of records.
- If it is easier to create a new record than to find an existing one.
- If a person has authority to create a new record with no corresponding sense of responsibility for data stewardship.
- There is no person, policy or process in place to stop a new record from being created
Then, a new record will be created every time. Even with policies and processes in place, there is a good chance the new record will be created because there is important work demanding people’s attention (and rightly so). ORM Partners data management solution takes steps to organize your company’s data in an intelligent and convenient way to reduce costs and save time.