My first question is “how you would get information when it’s not in your system”? Does your supplier manage inventory for all of your plants and facilities resulting in a global view of spend? Does your supplier manage your data to the OEM or to suppliers so you have duplicate inventory costs?

Just considering the MRO items, the information could come from engineering or the integrated supplier. Logically, the integrated supplier would have been provided the part information from your company in order to setup and purchase the items in the first place. It is likely that they have the records as they were given them and they are linked to item setup in the purchasing system. The top level source would have been engineering who would have either had the equipment constructed or been responsible for the equipment purchase and the parts along with them. If after or during the purchasing activity the “key” item record is setup in the purchasing system using the part supplier information versus the OEM information, this will lead to item duplication. Duplication then will create overstock, variant pricing, variant lead times and other inconsistencies that add unnecessary cost.

Based on what you are saying it sounds like items in your system are based on either the part supplier data or specifically identified by the integrated supplier (their item number). The best scenario is when the OEM part is what is setup as the key item, having the purchase action to the OEM directly (OEM setup as a supplier) removing the “middle man” cost. Second after that is having the OEM part as the item, linked to the specific supplier(s) for purchase. Local purchase suppliers are still linked to the same item also. Having the same item record used across the enterprise is optimum.

I would also add that there should be a means to discover OEM part information as a reactive purchase need comes from maintenance. Parts are typically identified physically with OEM information. For example an Allen Bradley/Rockwell module with have the Allen Bradley part number physically stenciled on it. If a part breaks and maintenance needs one, there must be a way to find out if that part is in stock and a way to buy it if is not.  We believe that enterprise wide viewable, verified and standardized OEM part information will reduce the cost for maintenance by eliminating the time consuming discovery of part information in your systems and the correct parts are stocked. This approach also enables part sharing between facilities that is limited without common data. Part sharing in turn reduces overall cost through reduction of inventory.  With plants here in the U.S. and worldwide, this type of advanced planning is where the true brunt of the savings come through.

Obviously, much depends on the specific agreements with your integrated supplier. But consider the following questions. If the data stored in your system is not the OEM information then it’s logical to assume that it is data created by the integrated supplier from the OEM data.

    1) How does your company know that the information is accurate? Are there any checks between the data given to the integrated supplier and what you have in your system?

    2) How does your company know if they have the correct parts setup in the system and stocked appropriately? It seems that there is an opportunity for the integrated supplier to setup and stock items which aren’t necessary and would only be discovered through data transparency.

    3) How does your company know that you are getting the best price on parts? Even if there is a cost savings agreement with the integrated supplier, if there are duplicates the opportunity for piece cost reduction is lost when the true usage is not known because of part duplication. 

My second question in this. It seems from your response that everything is running quite smoothly. But is that true in Manufacturing? Do they ever experience loss of production because a vital part could not be found or was out of stock? How about Maintenance? Inventory management? Engineering? These are the departments that should be surveyed because there is a benefit for them too.

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.

Data vs. Information definition: to simplify the concept, data is managed by a combination of a team of analysts and software to achieve the goal of a cleansed record or useable information. Data is imported and profiled, classified, structured, verified, enriched, translated and reports generated; we create useable information from low quality data for use in decision making related to engineering, purchasing, maintenance, marketing, sales, etc. The data that is exported into client systems is information that will meet a predetermined set of data governance rules and information quality requirements.

Data Quality Experts, let have a discussion on the definitions of data quality, does an address or a product detail meet the requirement if only classified? Or should verification at source (contact for address or manufacturer / supplier for product) be required at initial setup of the data in the system or maintenance scheduled as part of the data governance program? Is the data incomplete? Does the MDM process include a question / answer scenario to complete the data?

MDM software designers and developers can we also have a discussion on the software’s ease of use to manage the stages of data cleansing to support a MDM philosophy and using advanced techniques to automate the management, add intelligence in processing data imports, workflows and data cleansing stages of classifying, profiling, matching, translation, data audit analytics, exception reports and status reporting of a data record?

I believe these are great discussion points and will serve as great blog topics.

Thank you for your comments in “Something beyond MDM is coming your way – would MDM 2.0 fly?” and starting the discussion to expand the definition of MDM to include data integrity, data quality, entity resolution, matching, data integration, governance, metrics and analysis. The topics discussed should also include work flow (management of data and analysts), translation management, data structuring, data profiling, duplication removal, data change management, verification contact management, etc.

The MDM and PIM software industry needs to take a step back to understand actual day to day business requirements of data management to achieve Master Data Quality. Lesson one is that data is created and supplied by many sources in many different formats at various quality levels. Data is created by engineering, submitted by integrators, manufacturers and suppliers. To add to the complexity of the information flow, data is introduced into businesses systems in different departments (engineering or purchasing or maybe plant from maintenance) with different data requirements to meet the needs of that job function. Now the next dynamic is mashing new data to existing legacy data in a number of systems to ensure no duplicates are created, managing obsolete / recommended use and functional equivalents. The old philosophies of a PIM or MDM software to “hold, provide search functionality and maybe a shopping cart” isn’t going to meet the true requirements of the new definitions of Master Data Management.

To meet the new definitions the MDM or PIM software needs to provide horse power to electronically and intelligently processing data to identify exceptions for manual intervention by an analyst. Data should be processed one time to ensure that the data record will be enriched to meet the requirements of the enterprise and then the record is moved to a maintenance program (managed also by the MDM or PIM software). The processing of data needs to be efficient and cost effective, from my perspective the cost of data management should be covered by the cost saving achieved by MDM management.

I look forward to the discussions as the definition of MDM is expanded to include data quality, data governance, data provenience as the software industry provides the intelligence, functionality and business processes to cleanse, enrich and management data for my client to ensure their ability to make confident business decisions based on data integrity and accuracy.

Here is to the future of PIM and MDM!

Jackie Roberts

The requirements for our clients business requires the complete documentation of spare part record change history including: Spare parts list submitted by, equipment used on, location of equipment, verification and data enrichment including who verified, change in information, when, etc. Why is this information important?

1. Spare Parts List – The supplier submitted spare parts list should be made a mandatory requirement for equipment design and build. In order to support a maintenance organization all suppliers should submit a full bill of material with recommended spare parts identified for the equipment they plan to deliver. The supplier requirement should include the original manufacturer for each spare part. Additional information tracked should include who submitted, file name, equipment name, equipment warranty, terms of warranty, when submitted and all contact information.

2. Use on Equipment – each spare parts list should include equipment part or model number, standardized name and a category of equipment. The standardized naming conventions are extremely beneficial for multi-facility maintenance use and will support common tasking procedures.

3. Location of Equipment – this information is essential for the export to a CMS maintenance system enabling spare parts to be set up for maintenance, work orders created and tracked and asset management.

4. Verification – is essential for accuracy of data quality. The verification process of a spare part is sometimes a true investigation. We receive data with suppliers listed as the manufacturer, partial part numbers, conflicting descriptions, incomplete descriptions, etc. Each data element change should be documented with when changed, who revised, what was changed and why.

5. Data Enrichment – What does the full enterprise (purchasing, engineering or maintenance) need to support the business activity? A spare part record should be touched 1 time and all information required should be included at the time the record is set up. Data Enrichment will include a reference to a class (category), required attributes to describe the part supporting the technical long description, estimated price, ECCN (Export Compliance Classification Number), UNSPSC® (United Nations Standard Products and Services Code®), lead time, warranty, terms of warranty, tasking information, etc.

In order to implement an accountable data governance program and useable data structure, a well planned data mapping should be documented for legacy systems of the enterprise. A complete data governance program will enable new efficiencies for data processing and the management of improved business processes such as parts sharing, identifying critical spares, strategic spare parts purchasing, and warehousing.

If we’re talking about a large company then inevitably with this new system comes the monolith project with whole organizations of people and processes, projects and documentation. The compulsion is to be sure that everyone, everywhere who has any relationship to it has their input and their needs accounted for. Along the way, the cost of implementation and other peripheral indirect costs have likely negated a great deal of at least any short term savings. Not to mention the potential increase in continuous maintenance costs and loss in performance. These are a few things I’ve learned from experience and I welcome yours.

Always have a specific objective when planning for development or evaluating software to purchase that overrides all others. Start with something like a mission statement, “We need this new system for….”

Determine the Real Needs. Try to separate the “must haves” from the “nice to haves”. Bells and whistles are great but there needs to be a true benefit. Seek a balance between development time, software performance, hardware performance and user experience. I always try to put special emphasis on the user group which stands to benefit the most. Having many users who can do their job faster and more efficiently can add up to real savings versus the few users who have a special need which bogs down the project and performance.

Change is inevitable. If some requests for additional features come along, evaluate them against the mission objective. There is nothing wrong with listening and investigating ideas for project add-ons as long as the benefits outweigh the costs in time and money, but there needs to be a limit or you’ll never complete the project. Good ideas can always be implemented later if it makes sense then you’ll have the benefit of the research already done, but be quick with the research. Evaluate the impact for doing it now or waiting. Here are some good questions to start with: 1) How much more money?  2) Would this be faster/cheaper for programming to do it now versus waiting and doing a more complicated enhancement?  3) Is the impact to the users great enough to warrant it?

Know the roles. Good ideas can come from anyone. Every project must have a project champion who makes the final decisions (and live with them) and also eliminate roadblocks. You need a user advocate who has done the job and knows what it takes. Have programmers who possess both talent and vision, not just code crunchers, and listen to them.

Have good documentation, and “Good” is subject to interpretation. This is another area where the KISS principle is very often not utilized. If you have to hire ten people to sit in meetings just to maintain your documentation you’ve probably overcomplicated it and certainly increased your project cost. I try to start with these principles:

1. Document the people on the project and their responsibilities. Let there be no question as to who does what.
2. Everyone who has a job to do needs to understand what they need to do and have the documentation to reference.
3. Keep the language simple. Focus on getting the point across. If it takes a rocket scientist to understand it you’ve failed.
4. Of course, document the issues, decisions made, by whom etc. but be sensible. Document enough to cover for the “he said/she said” but content is most important. No bonus points for flash.
5. Know who is supposed to have what done and when. Another obvious one here but I see too often where target dates are determined top down with little or no thought to cost or the tasks. Don’t let the tail wag the dog. Pushing hard to get the job done is fine but be realistic. Listen to the people who know before making bold predictions.

The first step is to develop the Identification Guide (IG) in order to baseline the properties needed to best describe the class. For example, let’s take the class of SCREW, SHOULDER and the properties TYPE, MATERIAL, FINISH, THREAD SIZE, DRIVE SIZE, SHOULDER DIAMETER, SHOULDER LENGTH, THREAD LENGTH, HEAD DIAMETER, HEAD HEIGHT, SHOULDER LENGTH TOLERANCE, MINIMUM TENSILE STRENGTH, CLASS, HARDNESS RATING and PACKAGE QUANTITY. The IG also provides the information needed for our analysts to acquire properties and our applications to sequence the properties within the short and long descriptions that are built:

SCREW,SHOULDER – | TYPE: HEX HEAD | MATERIAL: 18-8 STAINLESS STEEL | FINISH: PLAIN | HEAD STYLE: HEX | THREAD SIZE: 3/8-16 INCHES | DRIVE SIZE: 3/4 INCHES | SHOULDER DIAMETER: 1/2 INCHES | SHOULDER LENGTH: 2-1/2 INCHES | THREAD LENGTH: 3/4 INCHES | HEAD DIAMETER: 3/4 INCHES | HEAD HEIGHT: 1/4 INCHES | SHOULDER LENGTH TOLERANCE: ±0.005 INCHES | MINIMUM TENSILE STRENGTH: 80.000 POUND-FORCE PER SQUARE INCH | CLASS: 2A | HARDNESS RATING: B85 TO B95 ROCKWELL A | PACKAGE QUANTITY: 2

Each time an item is submitted for coding or processing the item is imported into a master database. Through intervention by our data analysts, the item navigates its way through a number of checkpoints including an auto-suggest to propose a class. The class and properties via the IG are the requirements our coding analysts use to verify the accuracy of the information submitted, to verify the completeness and to acquire the additional information needed to enhance and build an item or spare part description for our clients to base real business decisions.

The implementation of the eOTD is a two process scenario when working with our clients. First, the legacy data is mapped to the class, the item data is profiled, cleansed and enhanced to meet the requirements of eOTD IG, ensuring the client’s data quality goals are met. The updated item information needs to be applied to existing client item data. It is critical that all changes to data be tracked and logged. A properly planned and executed update to legacy ERP and CMMS systems should be initiated to incorporate the enhanced and corrected item information into the user facing systems. This is an extremely critical step as the downstream information flow will affect systems and uses such as inventory re-distribution, purchasing and contract management, engineering bills of materials and maintenance schedules. A thorough and complete mapping of data through the enterprise should be used to understand data flow across all business units. The mapping should include data entry points and data use points through all departments which set up all of the cost saving pay points as the data processing is streamlined.

The second process is an on-going data maintenance plan for new items that are introduced into the organization. This process should start at the introduction of item information into the system. All items and spare part information should be verified with the manufacturer and classified to the eOTD before setup or use in any system. The length of time the coding process requires is a critical element as the item or spare part information should be as complete as possible while at the same time be ready and waiting for the buyer to put the item on a contact or a maintenance employee to setup the tasking information in the CMMS for a piece of equipment. The only requirement for the employees who use the information after its initial entry into the system is to perform the actual requirement of their job and not to decipher a cryptic unstructured description.

If the items are pre-processed using the eOTD and the associated ISO standards, every item and spare part will be structured and standardized. The engineering, purchasing and maintenance departments will focus on the core of their day to day specialized responsibilities instead of searching for parts or dealing with trying to purchase items that a supplier does not recognize or have to acquire the missing information.

We all agree on some of the basic benefits both in process and cost such as reducing inventory with the identification of duplicate items, facilitation of inventory sharing and internal purchasing programs, reduced employee time searching for parts, common spare part usage strategies, reduced downtime in manufacturing equipment due to lack of information availability and ability to manage using a just in-time inventory model. The eOTD and its Identification guides are the building blocks and the roadmap to achieving structured and accurate data that can be reliably used to base real world decisions.

For more information on the eOTD please visit www.eccma.org.

Here is the million dollar question, this is one scenario: Over a million records in a year, legacy and new records submitted for processing from 2,500 different users and two different business processes (single submit and BOM extract). What technology would be required to intelligently automate the processing of these records to a Master Data Quality Standard?

Remember this is an on-going maintenance process, not a one time migration of non-cleansed data to a new ERP or maintenance system, nor am I referring to parsing the records into different fields of the new ERP system but ensuring that the records are verified, structured, properly attributed with full descriptions and additional information to support the business needs.

First, let’s look at the Wikipedia definition of Product Information Management (PIM) “PIM systems generally need to support multiple geographic locations, multi-lingual data, and maintenance and modification of product information within a centralized catalog to provide consistently accurate information to multiple channels in a cost-effective manner.”

Future PIM software purchasers, what evaluation methods are you using to ensure that your PIM software purchase will support the continuous update and flow of data for your entire enterprise system? Here are some items to take into consideration during your evaluation, these are all items that I ask about and would recommend that you request the answers in writing:

1. How is the change history of the data stored in the system and how easily can it be retrieved?
2. Has the performance of all modules of the software been tested and what is the base line?
3. Request references (at least three) for each module of the software.
4. What is the software product work flow and how is the data processing assigned to employees?
5. Ask to review the documentation and take the time to review; this should be a window into the complexity of the system.
6. Request the design process model and how the software company incorporates customer feedback?
7. What is the bug fix process? What is the quality system to implement a bug fix?
8. What is the software company’s philosophy on customizations at your cost?
9. How is language handled? Translations referenced to a master record?
10. If the software solution is multi module system, how are the master records referenced through
the entire solution?
11. What are the long term design strategies or road maps for each module of the software solution? Ask for the earlier road maps and the software release note to evaluate the how well the software company plans and implement updates to the systems.

And I can go on and on, the licensing; customizing and implementing software in your environment can be extremely costly and time consuming, does Caveat emptor “Let the buyer beware” work in the business world or is there a “Lemon Law” when purchasing software?

So what can be done to insure profitability, or least stability, until growth returns? Control and further reduce costs. Already been there, done that? You have cut staff, benefits, wages, renegotiated prices and terms with suppliers, cut services, slowed production, cut inventories, everything you can think of. Are you sure? How well do you manage your Enterprise wide Master Data Indirect Materials / Commodities spend? What? Everything you buy that supports your facilities and the build of your products. Most large manufactures manage direct material precisely but don’t have an organized approach to their full advantage throughout the Enterprise to strategically manage indirect materials. A solution, fully implemented, provides a number of benefits:

1. “Cleansed” data, eliminating duplication of the same item coded to several different part numbers.

2. Consistent pricing for each and every part / component verified to the OEM level with lead time and warranty information. Minimizing your need to buy spare parts / commodities from distributors or your build sources.

3. Enterprise-wide material management to the department level in every Manufacturing Operation.

4. A reuse or repurposing of excess inventory in Manufacturing Engineering.

5. Able to search inventory with standardized part naming conventions and in multiple languages.

Bottom-line, an aggressive Enterprise wide well executed strategy can and will save your company significant dollars in the first 12 months of implementation. That’s 2010 folks….

Here are a few data management tips:

1. Data needs a simple way to be imported into the system. Data comes from a number of sources so a dynamic mapping and import procedure to an internal processing area is useful for data analysis.
2. Yes, there needs to be an area to work on data before it is promoted to a Master Data Status. Software developers need to understand that data is never in a pristine state ready to be entered as a Master Data Record. Never!
3. Data processing requires a managed work flow through the system. Imagine the issue to have thousands of records for analyzing and many employees trying to manage who has what records outside the system. Just not functional work scenario.
4. Never copy data from one software module or grid to another, always reference. Cost per record to manage the data is increased every time a person needs to manually update an aspect of a record more than once.
5. Performance of the software is imperative. To really capitalize on software and technology reporting and analysis need to be done on thousands of records at a time. Time is money.
6. Provenance tracking is extremely imperative especially when “Cataloging @ Source” is the foundation to the quality of the record. Data should be identified with history: where the data originated, contact information, data and time, a revision level, file name, all associated records on the file, etc. MDM system developers, can you start to see the importance of this information?
7. Data needs to be cleansed and profiled; it is important that the software processing tools understand all aspects of the data. For instance search rules should not be so rigid that it takes an analyst manual actions to find a duplicate record because of an extra space or a slash. A worse case scenario is to take the data out of the system to work the data in excel, I am not going to even comment any more on that scenario except that it is totally unacceptable to remove data from a system to try to normalize it. Remember there is a lot of data brought into the business and the cost to manage the data is not core to the primary business, it is an indirect cost. The solution is not outsourcing to a “low cost, low skilled” worker in another country when much of the preprocessing can be done at the expense of CPU time.
8. Data changes, if you have a number of different modules in your software package what is the strategy to support aggregation of the changes to the different business units using the data? Does your software only update in one module and the other modules are in an out of sync situation? Again remember software should be designed to simplify the processes to support the business needs.
9. We live in a global economy language translation and localization of data is more important now than ever. What are the methods translate and maintain localized data?
10. Reporting and exporting of information is critical. It is a requirement to export a segment data set to send to a business customer or run a report of the activities of the work. A MDM system must be able audit data activities through the complete process of import through promotion to a master record.

I am a firm believer that software should not dictate a business process but should be designed to streamline and add efficiency to lower the cost the activity. If you are designing MDM systems, your team should include experts in data management, data quality and business process expertise with applicable experience. Businesses should not be paying for customizations to your software to be support basic 101 management of data.