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For warehouse & MRO data owners
MRO material master data cleansing and Golden Record for SAP
The parts are on the shelf. The records describing them are inconsistent, incomplete and duplicated across sites - so the stock is invisible to everyone who needs it. Automa.Net rebuilds those records into a Golden Record your ERP and every site can read.
Of your material master mapped and enriched within the first 48 hours
Up to 15%
Hidden duplicates surfaced across the group: 3-8% exact, the rest functional overlap
92%
Data readiness and integrity reached by day 45, not month 12
The cost of a bad record
What a messy MRO material master really costs
Every downstream failure in MRO traces back to a record that could not be read, matched or trusted. Here is what each one actually costs.
01 / 04
The part exists, but nobody can find it
A technician searches free-text descriptions written by four different people over fifteen years. The search fails, so a new part is ordered - and the original stays on the shelf, ageing.
Cost: Search time, duplicate purchase, and a second unit of frozen capital
02 / 04
The same component is stocked under three numbers
Plant A calls it a sensor, Plant B lists it by the distributor’s code, Plant C by an internal legacy number. Three safety stocks are held for what is functionally one item.
Cost: Triple safety stock on a single part number’s worth of risk
Nobody knows the part is end-of-life until it fails
Lifecycle status is not a field anyone maintains by hand. The record says nothing, so the first signal is a failed unit and an OEM that stopped producing it two years ago.
Cost: Unplanned downtime, broker premium, or an emergency retrofit
04 / 04
ERP integrity degrades faster than anyone cleans it
Every new record added without a standard makes the next search worse. Manual cleansing projects run for months and are obsolete before they finish, because the inflow never stopped.
Cost: A permanent cleansing backlog that consumes budget without ever closing
The Golden Record standard
A Golden Record for every spare part, trusted by SAP
Not a one-off cleanse. A standard your material master is held to, continuously.
Enrichment
48h
Deep technical enrichment, starting immediately
As it sits in your ERP
MAT-0098431|PSU 24VDC 5A SCHNEID ABL8
Resolved against 10.5M+ catalogue products
Manufacturer:
Schneider Electric
Part number:
ABL8REM24050
Short text:
Phaseo regulated switch mode power supply, 100...240 V AC, 24 V DC 5 A
Lifecycle
Obsolete
Availability
26 pcs
Avg market price
€136.00
Successor mapped
ABLS1A24050
Records are resolved against a catalogue of 10.5M+ unique industrial products and populated with the fields your ERP needs but your source data never had.
OEM part numbers, manufacturer and brand normalisation
Weights, dimensions and tariff codes for S/4HANA readiness
Technical attributes extracted from unstructured descriptions
Ingests your material master as-is - no pre-cleansing required
Live availability and market price range attached to every resolved record
A validation layer in front of your ERP
New and changed records are standardised against naming conventions and attribute rules before they land in SAP - so the master stays clean instead of degrading again after go-live.See how a material request works
Obsolescence surfaced across the whole database
Lifecycle status is applied at scale and functional successors are mapped, turning EOL from an incident into a planning input.See the successor tree
Idle at one plant, about to be bought at another
Once every site resolves to the same product, spare-part stock across every warehouse becomes a single searchable pool. The Internal Redeployment Radar flags idle and above-maximum stock before another site raises a purchase order.See the procurement side
Duplicate discovery
Find duplicate spare parts and stop new ones at the source
Duplicates are not found by comparing text. They are found by resolving each record to the product it actually describes, then noticing that the products are identical.
Plant A · Czechia
Fotorelé SICK - WSU26/3-103A00 vysílač
Plant B · Germany
WSU263103A00 Safety Single-Beam Sensor
Plant C · Poland
1047984 CZUJNIK BEZP NADAJNIK
Resolved to one Golden Record
MPN
WSU26/3-103A00
Manufacturer
SICK
Held at
3 sites · 11 pcs total
Safety stock held
3× for 1 part
Why text matching is not enough
A string comparison sees three unrelated records above. Semantic matching reads the technical attributes - single-beam photoelectric safety switch, sender unit, 70 m range, Type 4 / PL e, order number 1047984 - and resolves all three to the same catalogue product regardless of language or local convention.
Each match carries a confidence indicator. High-confidence merges can be actioned directly; borderline cases are queued for a human decision rather than merged silently.
3-8%
Exact duplicates in a typical material master
15%
Commonly reached once functional overlap counts
5-15%
Stock reduction without touching service levels
Stop duplicates before they reach the ERP
A cleaned master stays clean only if new parts are checked on the way in. A material request searches your group and the Automa.Net catalogue before anyone creates a record.
Checked against every plant. Each part is searched across your group before a record is opened. Exact duplicates and near matches are flagged.
Manufacturer data from the catalogue. MPN, manufacturer, description, lifecycle status, successor, weight and tariff code arrive verified. Your team adds plant, storage bin, stock levels and price.
A sheet ready for master data. Excel export with a 40-character ERP description that keeps manufacturer and MPN. Up to 50 parts per list.
Obsolete parts, their successors and what is safe to cut
Neither works on a sample. Applied across every record, lifecycle status turns end-of-life into a maintenance planning input, and criticality turns stock reduction into a decision you can defend.
Every discontinued part points to its replacement
The successor tree links each part to its predecessors and successors, so an old number with no stock leads straight to the generation that still ships.
Lifecycle status on every generation: active or discontinued
Live offer count per part, one click from the listing
Stock held under the old and the new number resolved to one family
What no site will ever need again is a different decision - recovering its value is covered on the Surplus recovery page.
Cutting stock is easy. Cutting the right stock is the job.
Criticality
Critical · slow-moving
Rarely consumed, stops production when it fails. The most expensive item to be wrong about.
Protect - hold cover
Critical · fast-moving
Consumed regularly and production-stopping. Availability is non-negotiable.
Optimise, never cut
Non-critical · slow-moving
Rarely used, replaceable, not production-stopping. Where the frozen capital usually sits.
Reduce or redeploy
Non-critical · fast-moving
High turnover, low consequence. Manage on price and lead time, not on cover.
Consolidate supply
Consumption frequency
Any consultant can take 20% out of your inventory. The question is whether the line stops eight months later.
You cannot segment what you cannot identify. If the same part appears three times under three descriptions, its consumption looks slow in all three records - and it lands in the wrong quadrant every time.
Optimised safety stock levels calculated per part, per site
Reduction targets applied only where consequence is low
Criticality defined by you - your process knowledge, our data layer
How to turn these levels into MIN and MAX for each part is covered in our MIN/MAX inventory guide.
How the enrichment actually works
How material master enrichment works, and where it stops
Enrichment claims are easy to make and hard to audit. These are the mechanics, including the limits.
OEM brands the catalogue resolves to
9000+OEM brands
10.5M+unique industrial products
What the catalogue fills in
Description
Power contactor, 9 A, 4 kW / 400 V, 3-pole
Manufacturer
Siemens
MPN
3RT2016-1BB41
Net weight
0.294 kg
Lifecycle
Active product
+20 more attributes
The method
Each record is parsed for technical attributes and matched against a catalogue of 10.5M+ unique industrial products, normalised to OEM part numbers rather than to any one distributor’s structure. Where an OEM number is present in your data it anchors the match; where it is absent, semantic matching on attributes does the work.
The limits
The 40-50% mapped in 48 hours is the share we resolve with high confidence at first pass. The remainder is not lost - it is worked through progressively toward the 92% readiness figure - but the first-pass number is deliberately the one we quote, because it is the one you can verify yourself two days in.
Confidence is shown, not hidden
Every match carries a confidence level. Low-confidence results are queued for review rather than written into your master.
Your data is never sold
Aligned with ISO 27001, hosted on Microsoft Azure with Cloudflare protection, MFA and role-based access by site.
You keep the decision
Merges, successor mappings and stock changes are proposals until your team approves them. Nothing writes back automatically.
Send one ERP export. See duplicates, gaps and obsolete parts.
Within 48 hours you will have 40-50% of your material master mapped and enriched, a first duplicate list, and a clear view of what can and cannot be resolved from your data. No commitment attached to the result.
How do you reduce duplicate MRO parts without a manual data cleansing project?
Manual cleansing is too slow to ever catch up with the inflow of new records. Instead, your material master is ingested as-is and duplicates are identified by resolving each record to the product it describes and comparing technical attributes - not by comparing description text. That makes a 5-15% stock reduction achievable without waiting out a twelve-month data project, because the redundancy being removed is genuine rather than assumed.
What exactly does “Golden Record” mean in an MRO context?
One authoritative record per physical part, shared across every site, with standardised description, manufacturer, OEM part number, technical attributes, tariff code and lifecycle status. The point is not tidiness. It is that a search at Plant C returns the part Plant A already holds, and that your ERP can be trusted as a source of truth rather than treated as a rough guide.
How do you stop new duplicates once the master is clean?
Through material requests. Before anyone opens a new material, the part is searched across every plant in your group and in the Automa.Net catalogue - exact duplicates and near matches are flagged. For a genuinely new part, manufacturer, MPN, description, lifecycle status, successor, weight and tariff code are filled in from the catalogue, so the requester only adds plant, storage bin, stock levels and price. The output is an Excel sheet your master data team can load into SAP, with a 40-character short text that always keeps manufacturer and MPN.
How do you identify obsolete parts and find their replacements?
Lifecycle status is applied to every record, so end-of-life parts come out as a list rather than one failure at a time. Each part is then placed in a successor tree: its predecessors, its direct successor and the latest generation, each with its lifecycle status and number of live offers. An old number with no stock leads straight to the generation that still ships, and stock held under the old and the new number is resolved to one family instead of being counted as two materials.
How do you balance stock reduction against the risk of production downtime?
By segmenting before cutting. Criticality analysis separates parts that can stop production from parts that cannot, and optimised safety stock levels are calculated against real consumption once duplicates are consolidated. Reduction targets are applied to the non-critical, slow-moving quadrant. Mission-critical positions are protected, and stockout risk on them is modelled explicitly rather than assumed away. How to set the levels themselves is covered in our MIN/MAX inventory guide.
Do we have to clean our data before sending it?
No. The material master is ingested as-is, including blank manufacturer fields, mixed languages and legacy internal codes. Records that cannot be resolved are shown, not hidden: we look for traceability in any extra source you have - purchase text, invoices and POs, SAP translation tables - and if that gives no match, your warehouse team identifies the part from its nameplate with our stock take app, AutomaSNAP.