310 – Name Your Spare Parts Correctly with Conrad Greer
It is my pleasure to welcome Conrad Greer to the podcast, the founder of SPCResults.
In this episode we covered:
- What is data cleansing?
- Why do we want to standardize our material information?
- Is MPN a saving grace?
Why do we want to standardize our material information, our material, masters, our taxonomy, all those different things?
It makes work flow. It cuts down on mistakes. Most companies on their strategic goals want to operate better and safer.
We have this problem of these inaccurate material, masters, or spare parts information. How do we go about cleaning that or fixing that?
You need to put all the materials into a taxonomy. So, you’re structuring them against a common standard. M concept is an identity taxonomy. I use the word identity because it’s not just the descriptions, it’s the most common concept that I run into and particularly to non-warehouse maintenance people. All these things have a manufacturer’s part number.
Can you tell us about SPCResults and how people can get in touch with you to help understand the scope and magnitude of this problem and how to solve it?
What I found as the root cause was this lack of a consistent identity taxonomy. I did my own research collected several hundreds of thousands of material masters and their roots. How do I consolidate them? I came up with my own taxonomy. If you apply this taxonomy and you have the classes and the attributes and the items are mapped to the classes, the offshore data cleanse is a very effective tool.
What is data cleansing?
Say we’ve got a million old records that we map to, and, and it can even be called machine learning and artificial intelligence. We’ve gone back and reviewed but what they haven’t done is consolidated, how many actual classes there should be – that is very significant. Having that consistency across these classes is the first fundamental thing. Get the classes; it’s around the order of 500 classes. Largely finding the materials that they need to execute that plan in the system is key.
Is MPN a saving grace?
An empirical observation is that MPN is not the key to the D to these materials. What I have observed is it’s because it’s been collected. This step of how to put together these MRO materials in a consistent, useful basis nobody solved that problem is not a rocket side problem. There is management consulting expertise with inventory, and it comes from direct materials and manufacturing.
If you take a material master and you populate; a class, so you put together, if you have a second material that has the same attributes in that class, you know it maps to the same class and has all the same attributes. That is an effective duplicate. The first thing is making it rational. You need to take the universe of industrial MRO materials and you know, that is relatively common across industries.
As you go through these records and you plan at what class to put it in, you need a way of finding these synonyms and mapping them together. And that’s something that is a missing thing in a lot of systems. Now they’re based on data cleanses.
How do you get the new capital data?
There’s a number of roads there. What I offer is the taxonomy, the analysis up front. I want to be your guide to get you to this quality MRO identities and set you up so that you’ve got the governance so that it stays that way. And so that, that is my objective. The other two sort of associated things with it is the life cycle, the capital projects, getting that whole building across the board from what we built, getting the asset strategy, linking it up to the asset strategies, then the stocking and sparing strategies. And then creating the records. There’s a flow across there of getting that new capital project data.
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Conrad Greer Links:
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