Item Entry

Gatekeeper's item entry functionality has been developed to let you manage a complex process across a wide, dispersed organisation. It allows the request to be captured and tracked from the earliest stage right through to the transmission of the complete record into the ERP system. Your central data team gains clear visibility and control over the various groups responsible for completion of each part of the data creation process.

A simple initial data capture wizard hides powerful anti-duplication features. These ensure that from the very first entry of basic data, you are minimising the load by leveraging your common items wherever possible and encouraging users to provide the technical information needed to comply with your corporate description standard.

From then on, you retain visibility of which groups have completed and authorised their respective sets of data until your new item has all the right information and is fully approved. The person who originally requested the new item is kept informed by email and provided with notification immediately a record is synchronised with your ERP system and becomes available for use.

Change Control

Changing existing items is a more difficult technical challenge than entering new items but Gatekeeper has been designed to handle all the complexities behind the scenes and leave the user with a simple process.

There are many reasons for modifying existing records, including:

• Populating missing data
• Correcting errors in the data
• Updating of standards (abbreviations, classification systems, translations)

In each case, Gatekeeper allows the user to suggest changes and then enables a data steward to verify and approve changes.

Maintaining a material master is not just about the occasional one-off request or amendment. New machines are purchased or transferred between factories requiring large parts lists to be created, and OEMs are continually amending their catalogues. You may wish to change to a new spend classification system, without the hassle of re-cleaning your entire catalogue, or add a new language for your descriptive data.

Gatekeeper provides functionality to manage the bulk upload of spares parts lists and can also handle part supersession and obsolescence, retaining the history of previous versions for better searching and reference. New classification systems and languages can be readily added and used to update all of your data without any significant re-work.

ERP Data

One of the common challenges of keeping you master data under control is that you have lots of different systems using it, each requiring a variety of additional information to complete a record for its own purposes.

Moreover, each piece of this additional ERP data may need to change according to the context. For example, the weight of an item will remain constant across systems and plants, but an item’s re-order point needs to be set independently for each site, taking in account the frequency of issue at the site and potentially different lead times.

As well as enabling you to set up the necessary fields for each of your enterprise systems that require synchronisation, Gatekeeper lets you nominate the level of the data to be held, be it at Global, Regional, Plant or even Warehouse levels, together with allowable values, field lengths and default settings as needed for each system attribute.

These ERP attributes are also grouped to set up the workflow between different departments, e.g. Procurement, Logistics and Engineering, to allow staff with the right knowledge to edit and approve them. Using this combination of groups and data levels, Gatekeeper allows you to control who can add, edit and approve data for each combination, and then track progress in a request profile grid.

This means that you really are able to have a single system to manage materials data entry across your company, leveraging a central database and following a common process, without the need to allow local workarounds that undermine data quality.

Synchronisation

Whilst Gatekeeper can act as your single channel for item creation and maintenance, it needs to ensure all data is properly replicated to the enterprise systems where it is needed.

It records mappings to each of your systems and, following approved changes or additions, automatically triggers data updates in a number of ways, including:

• Web Services – immediate synchronisation suitable for single line entry and updates.
• Other methods particular to the end system, e.g. XI, SAP iDocs.
• Flat text or XML files to agreed FTP sites – batch response suitable for mass uploads of data.

The format, frequency and technical configuration of outputs are created for each customer according to parameters agreed during implementation and building on previous experience gained integrating to major ERP, PDM and CMMS systems such as SAP, Maximo and Oracle.

Key Gatekeeper workflow functionality can also be made available as a set of web services, enabling you to integrate functionality (e.g. prevention of duplicates and structuring of descriptions) into any materials management solution, be that a purchasing workflow portal, or a broader PLM or MDM solution.