Maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) groups at many companies are facing a major challenge: toxic MRO master catalogs stuffed with incomplete data on replacement parts, a problem that drives up costs and creates large-scale problems for multiple corporate divisions.
To combat this problem, companies must engage in a comprehensive effort to standardize and enrich MRO data, adopt a sustainable MRO data-governance model, and develop a strategy for MRO lifecycle management, according to John Ferguson, certified maintenance and reliability professional for the IHS Supply Chain service at information and analytics provider IHS.
Speaking last month via a live IHS webcast event entitled “Understanding the Cause & Effects of Toxic MRO Foundational Data,” Ferguson described the magnitude of the MRO-parts challenge and outlined possible solutions to the problem.
“Companies must recognize the importance of solid MRO foundational data, and they have to understand the correlation this has to other areas of their business,” Ferguson said. “Once they get the foundation right, other related goals or initiatives in operational excellence will be much easier. The lack of emphasis on MRO data quality results in inefficiency. Organizations waste an inordinate amount of time and resources in trying to make other pieces of the MRO lifecycle and maintenance and reliability work with master data that ranges from being poor quality to being downright ‘toxic.’”