Ensuring your master data is accurate, complete, and consistent makes it an accessible, powerful tool for informing critical maintenance, repair, and operations decisions. Data audits determine the quality of your data and whether it is robust enough to provide insights into supply management, maintenance scheduling, and other critical MRO tasks.
Bad Data May Be Holding You Back
Neglecting to develop and adhere to standard processes and guidelines invites data inconsistencies. Harnessing information by standardizing master data field entries is the first step in making data work for you. The alternative is unthinkable:
- Extra carrying costs – The same item is listed multiple times under different names and descriptive data. The excess inventory takes up warehouse space, ties up capital that could be used for more productive purposes, and incurs the risk of becoming obsolete.
- False stockouts – Mislabeled orders effectively hide stores of material from MRO supply chain managers, preventing them from being accessed when needed. Unable to locate the reserve supply, procurement teams perceive a critical shortage and reorder, often paying for direct purchases and expedited delivery.
- Inefficiency and disorder – Bad data can obscure or even give false signals about which parts are due for maintenance and replacement, hindering your MRO team’s scheduled and predictive maintenance efforts. The inability to coordinate line maintenance and make off-peak repairs to prevent catastrophic failures causes unduly long downtimes.
SDI’s MRO Data Audit Process
As a global leader in supply chain as a service, SDI can engineer a custom data solution that suits your needs, infrastructure, and budget. To start your data audit, SDI’s technicians and industry experts help you identify your company’s specific pain points. We will drill down to find their causes and counsel you on the optimal protocols for dealing with them.
With these standards established and work rules in place, we overhaul your data, populating missing fields and standardizing codes, long and short descriptions, master vendor lists, parts categories and attributes, and even add images where appropriate. Our vast experience empowers us to enrich your data with insights we have gained from working with hundreds of manufacturing companies, bringing your records into compliance with international standards and best-in-breed platforms. We can train your key people in using data and ensuring it is always up to date and that new parts and supplies are entered according to the established taxonomy. Data maintenance is just as important as equipment maintenance, so we implement practices and routines to keep your data clean and actionable.
To achieve this end, SDI will create and share with you a comprehensive “state of the data” report, outlining strengths and deficiencies that could bear on production and management. We will suggest options for improving your data collection, recording, use, and maintenance, showing you models to consider. Each model will include the benefits we can achieve for you upon implementation.
What to Expect from an SDI MRO Data Audit
You can expect better, data-driven performance in three key areas as a result of an SDI MRO data audit:
- More accurate material purchase and distribution – Data that accurately describes MRO materials, their storage locations, and their applications enable faster picking, packing, and delivery to production lines. Moreover, strong data reduces inventory costs by informing more accurate reorder points by eliminating hidden inventory and parts being logged and warehoused under more than one SKU.
- Reduced labor costs and improved service levels – Data can identify how and where specific MRO items are consumed. If particular departments, locations, or shifts use more of some items, they can be allocated accordingly for a more efficient workflow. All necessary maintenance items – consumables, tools, replacement parts, repair manuals, etc. – can be packaged in advance so their ready when needed, boosting service levels and getting equipment up and running faster.
- Faster resupply and vendor response – Well-defined parts descriptions and precise, centralized master data sheets eliminate ordering errors. Strong data helps in describing parts needs with suppliers and in sourcing substitute materials and backup vendors. Having these safeguards in place eliminates delays in order fulfillment and costs associated with off-contract buys.
SDI approaches data as a strategic and tactical asset. Working from that premise, our data audits aims to organize and present your data in a format that helps you gain a three-dimensional view of your MRO process. This allows you to envision ways the MRO supply chain can better support your overall mission and integrate with other stakeholders.
Contact SDI to schedule your comprehensive MRO data audit and learn about our on-site product identification, human and artificial intelligence data analysis, and other services. We can manipulate your data to provide a single version of your MRO reality, cleanse and enrich your predictive and consumption data, and integrate MRO data into your organization’s entire supply chain. Whatever your expectations, SDI will exceed them.
