You have a quote, not a market
A single supplier quote tells you what one company will charge today. Without a market band you cannot tell whether that number is fair, generous, or 40% high. And you have nothing defensible to negotiate with.
For MRO procurement teams
Know the market price of every spare part you buy.
Automa.Net benchmarks your MRO spend against 36M+ live offers from 750+ verified suppliers - then shows you where you overpay, where another plant already has the part on the shelf, and where a certified refurbished unit does the same job for 25-40% less.
- No ERP integration
- CSV or Excel accepted
- Results in 48 hours
Trusted by
- 36M+
- Live market offers benchmarked against your spendRefreshed continuously
- 750+
- Verified suppliers, distributors and stockistsVetted before listing
- 10.5M+
- Unique industrial products in the reference databaseOEM-normalised
- 48h
- To first matched and priced view of your material masterNot a 12-month project
The problem
MRO spend leaks quietly, in four predictable places
Direct materials get scrutinised line by line. MRO rarely does. It is high-variety, low-volume and urgent, and that combination is where price discipline breaks down.
The same part, three prices, one group
The same component is bought under different local descriptions, from different distributors, on different terms. Nobody sees the spread, because nobody can match the records.
An external PO for a part sitting in another warehouse
Cross-site visibility fails at the data layer, not the willingness layer. One site's surplus is described one way, another site's requirement another way. The match never happens and the money leaves the group.
End-of-life found at the moment of failure
An EOL component is a normal purchase until the line stops. Then it becomes a rush order, a broker premium, or an unplanned retrofit. That is the most expensive way to learn a lifecycle status.
What Automa.Net does for procurement
Five capabilities that turn spend data into negotiating power
Capability 01
Global price benchmarking
Every line of your MRO spend is matched to the same physical product across the market. Then it is priced against what that product actually trades for, not against a list price nobody pays.
- Automated comparison of internal spend against 36M+ live market offers
- Market band per part: low, median, high - not a single reference number
- Supplier-level view of who is competitive on which categories
- Export-ready evidence pack for your next negotiation round
Capability 02
Refurbished advantage: 25-40% on non-critical parts
Not every part on your line needs to be new. On non-critical positions, professionally restored components do the same job for materially less. The warranty makes the decision auditable.
- Access to 80+ restoration and repair specialists across Europe
- 24-month warranty on qualifying refurbished components
- Criticality filter so mission-critical positions stay on new parts
- Useful where the OEM lead time is measured in months, not days
Capability 03
Cross-site PPV analytics
Once every plant's material master speaks the same language, Purchase Price Variance stops being a theory. You see which site pays what, per part. You also see what the group would save at the best internal price.
- Side-by-side price comparison across your factory network
- Quantified savings if all sites bought at the internal best price
- Category and supplier roll-ups for consolidation decisions
- A defensible baseline for group framework agreements
Capability 04
PO Stop dashboard: buy nothing you already own
Before an external purchase order goes out, the system checks your other sites for the same part. If it sits there as surplus, the buyer is flagged while the decision is still open.
- Proactive alert when a needed part sits idle at another site
- Hard cost avoidance, measured and reportable
- Duplicate discovery across sites regardless of local naming
- Internal redeployment before external sourcing, by default
Capability 05
Market-aware BOM optimisation
Upload a bill of materials and get it back enriched: current market pricing, lead times, lifecycle status and successor parts for anything approaching end of life.
- Up to 500 products per BOM upload
- Lead-time and EOL risk flags per line
- Functional successors mapped for obsolete items
- Works for spares kits, retrofits and new-project sourcing alike
From raw export to negotiation-ready evidence
You do not need a clean material master to start. You need an export.
01Day 0
Send your data as-is
A material master or spend export from SAP, Infor, Maximo or Excel. No pre-cleaning, no restructuring, no IT project.
0248 hours
Match and enrich
Records are resolved to catalogue products and populated with OEM numbers, brands, weights, tariff codes and lifecycle status.
03Week 1-2
Benchmark and quantify
Matched lines are priced against the live market. You receive PPV by site, duplicate findings and a ranked savings list.
04Day 45
Act and keep it current
Redeploy internally, renegotiate with evidence, source refurbished where criticality allows - and hold data readiness as a standard. 92% readiness by day 45.
- No ERP integration
- CSV or Excel accepted
- Results in 48 hours
A benchmark is only worth the data behind it
Price intelligence is easy to claim and hard to verify. Here is what our figures are actually built from, so you can judge them.
OEM brands
10.5M+
unique industrial products
36M+
offers from 750+ verified suppliers
Suppliers trading on the platform
- Match confidence per line
- Low-confidence matches are flagged for review, not silently priced.
- Thin categories labelled
- Where few offers exist, the band is marked low-sample, not sold as market truth.
- Ranges, not promises
- Savings figures are observed ranges across customer datasets. Your baseline decides.
- Your data stays yours
- Never sold, never pooled into anyone else's benchmark in identifiable form.
When this works - and when it does not
A short honest filter saves everyone a discovery call.
A strong fit if
- You run two or more plants and suspect the same parts are bought at different prices
- Your MRO material master is large, inconsistent, and nobody wants to own a manual cleanse
- You buy industrial automation components: PLCs, drives, sensors, HMIs, motors, pneumatics
- Procurement is asked for savings evidence, not savings claims
- Obsolescence risk is real and currently unmanaged
Probably not yet if
- Your spend is dominated by custom-fabricated or single-source OEM assemblies with no market comparators
- You buy mainly direct materials or commodities rather than MRO spares
- You need a full ERP master data governance rollout rather than spend intelligence - start with the data side first
- Every position in your inventory is safety-critical and refurbished sourcing is excluded by policy - the benchmarking still applies, the refurbished lever will not
Frequently asked questions
How do you benchmark MRO prices when every plant describes parts differently?
Matching happens before pricing. Records are resolved to catalogue products using OEM part numbers where available and semantic matching on technical attributes where they are not - so “SENS IND M18 PNP NO” and “Inductive sensor M18, PNP, NO” resolve to the same item. Only matched lines are benchmarked, and each carries a confidence indicator so you can see which conclusions rest on strong matches.
What data do you need from us to start, and in what format?
An export of your material master or MRO spend - CSV or Excel is fine. Useful columns are internal code, description, manufacturer if recorded, quantity and price paid. You do not need to clean or restructure it first; handling messy source data is the point of the enrichment step. No ERP integration is required to get the first benchmark.
How is refurbished sourcing kept safe for production-critical equipment?
By excluding it where it does not belong. Refurbished sourcing is applied to non-critical positions, with criticality defined by you, not by us. Qualifying components come from vetted restoration partners and carry a 24-month warranty. For mission-critical positions the recommendation stays on new parts - the savings lever there comes from price benchmarking and internal redeployment instead.
How does the PO Stop dashboard actually prevent a purchase?
It surfaces the conflict at the moment it matters. When a part is needed at one site and the same part is sitting as idle or above-maximum stock at another, the buyer is notified before the external order is placed. The resulting internal transfer is recorded as hard cost avoidance, so the saving is measurable rather than assumed.
What savings can we realistically expect?
It depends on your baseline, and any vendor who answers otherwise is guessing. Observed ranges across customer datasets: 25-40% on non-critical parts sourced refurbished, 3-8% of a material master identified as exact duplicates, and 5-15% reduction in frozen MRO capital where cross-site visibility was previously absent. The benchmark on your own data is what tells you where you sit - and that report exists before you commit to anything.
How current is the market data behind the benchmark?
The offer pool is refreshed continuously from live supplier activity on the platform rather than from periodic catalogue imports. Where a specific part has few recent offers, the band is flagged as low-sample so it is not treated as a firm market price.
Who owns the data we upload, and where is it stored?
You do. Your data is never sold and is not pooled into other customers' benchmarks in identifiable form. The platform is hosted on Microsoft Azure with Cloudflare protection, aligned with ISO 27001 standards, with multi-factor authentication and role-based access rights so each site sees only what it should.
How does this differ from a spend analytics or e-procurement tool?
Spend analytics tools classify what you spent. They do not know what a part is or what it should cost, because they have no product-level reference data or live market offers. Automa.Net starts from the part itself - resolving the record, then pricing it against real offers. In practice the two are complementary: spend analytics tells you where the money went, this tells you whether the price was right.
See your own numbers first
Send one export. Within 48 hours you will see how much of your material master we can match, what it is worth against the market, and where the first savings sit. No commitment attached to the result.