You would never believe the discussions around the “ho-hum” or “don’t sweat the small details” elements of a data cleansing project. Believe it or not, understanding your material type and material status is critical to be able to automate system updates. I have a firm belief that data updates to legacy systems should be completed as a night job or direct feed based a series of programmed templates. In one recent example we created an Oracle system update process for a new item referencing a material type template or another update process if the item is already set up for another location of use but is new to the requesting location, this is sometimes referred to as a location setup or purchasing organization update. You can start to imagine the amount pre-planning work and data mapping that is required for a data cleansing program.

The first fundamental rule is that the customer business doesn’t stop. For all you data purists out there that believe that one day a switch to turn on the cleansed database is in the near future, please include me, I would like to see it. Most master data management projects included years and years of legacy data; therefore there is an acceptance to draw a line in the database by last used date. When I design a data cleansing project, I will have a new item setup process referenced to legacy items, this way the client business continues and as the new items are analyzed and setup, we can reference and update the legacy item information. Independently, we will always have the legacy data cleansing parallel the new set up process.

As the data cleansing project is designed, let’s start to explore the data elements and classifications. Every client will have their material types and material status set up but generally during the data / systems assessment there should be a thorough review of industry standards vs. company processes. I find that our clients appreciate the opportunity to bench mark their processes and data structure elements such as material types and status.  We will start with material type and material status.

Material Type

Material types can be as simple as goods and services or as complicated as service, critical spare, spare part, commodity, generic, blueprint, etc. The material type is a critical element to classify which template is used for setup in the downstream legacy systems with an inventory stocking strategy applied.

Obviously a service can be standardized by the class type to describe the service where a cost for the service can be standardized. The definition of the service is described by the properties, for instance a service class of CLEANING, OFFICE can be set up with descriptive elements such as 10,000 square feet, light cleansing (dusting / vacuuming), etc. From a purchasing perspective, the buyer can run the reports globally to determine how much is spent for office cleaning then evaluate the costs and utilize best practice sourcing strategies and other global supply chain processes to lower costs. The purpose of the standard naming conventions of classes and property are to provide enough standardize information to provide the ability to compare and cost services or products.

If a critical spare is being set up for sourcing and inventory, then the part has been evaluated by maintenance or engineering and determined that the spare is critical for production uptime. An inventory plan is developed for stocking the critical spare including an initial buy quantity, plan for stores (inventory) setup of item’s unit of measure (each, assembly, package, etc.), min / max, reorder quality, stocking location, etc.

Material Status

In addition to applying a “material type” to the item records, due to the longevity of materials used in the manufacturing operation, a material status should be utilized as a long term data maintenance process. In dealing with component manufacturers and suppliers, a component may be active from a plant use perspective; however the component manufacturer no longer manufactures the item. How is that possible? A piece of equipment can have a 10 year or a 50 year life span, to maintain a piece of equipment, a list of recommended spare parts is identified and set up for equipment maintenance. If the spare part component is obsolete by the manufacturer but the piece of equipment is still in use on the production line, the material status would be “obsolete active”. A different buy / stock strategy would be implemented, such as purchase all available stock from the manufacturer or another alternative is to source with unconventional methods such as through eBay or maybe contract the item to be built by a local shop.

Typical material statuses that I have experienced are active, inactive item referenced to an active item, obsolete active, obsolete inactive (typically the status to start the disposal process) and archive. The archive status is a classification used by the analysts to allow the viewing of the item information but is not visible to the client or the item record is not exported to the client systems.

I would appreciate any input or better yet a discussion of the different material types and material status used in Product Information Management (PIM) or Master Data Management (MDM). As an industry we inherited material types and material status used in a purchasing system or maintenance systems designed to meet business function but not from the data quality or master data management perspective. What are the proper data requirements for a material type or material status? The MDM or PIM software companies and data quality consultants need to provide input from the data management perspective to provide long term data management functionality.