The typical company in the oil, gas and chemical industry has a material master system for maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) that includes hundreds of thousands of parts. Valves, gaskets, hoses, piping and other critical components – in multiple sizes, configurations and pieces – are needed for safe, reliable operations. Downtime is expensive and can often cost upwards of half a million dollars in lost production for every start/stop – so accessibility to those parts is vital. Managing that inventory is a major endeavor that many companies don’t handle well. With vast enterprise-wide records; siloed functional groups; and various field operations locations, equipment and personnel, data is generally inaccurate, disconnected, and often becomes an operational liability.

Even with governance efforts in place, setup is often spotty, with employees making multiple entries of the same part with different nomenclature, permissible by open text entry. To avoid redundancy, a material data entry should only be created once in the system and assigned a unique description code and taxonomy. With no standards for how materials are identified, the system easily becomes unwieldy and inefficient. Read on