Deliver better performance

As a senior manager in a multi-national organisation you are charged with improving operational efficiency, reducing working capital and minimizing risk. Your organisation is constantly changing, with new plants being built around the world and mergers and acquisitions providing integration challenges. You want to implement best practices globally and are under pressure from shareholders to constantly improve performance.

sparesFinder can help you by providing a comprehensive set of world-class solutions and services in materials management. Working with some of the best-known companies in the world, we have built up a large pool of expertise and offer reliable, proven solutions, implemented quickly and delivering excellent value.

Our solutions help you to reduce materials costs, across many sites, in ways previously unavailable to large organisations. Whether it is producing the consistent clean data required to run your ERP effectively, providing your procurement staff with the information to identify and drive corporate-wide inventory optimisation programmes, or giving all your stores staff better visibility of the spares that are available to them, sparesFinder offers the right package.

Please click here to read more about our solutions, or contact us to discuss how we can help you to improve the performance of your company.

Reduce my supply costs

As a procurement specialist in a large company you are responsible for one or more purchasing categories in your organisation. You want to leverage the scale of your materials procurement but don't have good enough information because data held in your systems is poorly organised and difficult to access. As a consequence, your negotiating position with suppliers is weakened since they have better information than you do.

Worse still, you know that there is considerable commonality across your sites and that people are buying what is already owned, and possibly surplus, elsewhere in the company. This leads to high inventory levels and excessive stock write-offs.

sparesFinder's set of applications and services are designed to assist you in all project phases, improving the quality of your data and providing you with cross-site reporting and visibility, even when the source data is contained in many different legacy systems. Masterpiece and Gatekeeper will get your data to a high quality and keep it there, while our analytical application Insight will put the right information at your fingertips.

Insight delivers all the reports and analysis needed to drive a pro-active supply chain and inventory optimisation programme, leveraging your consolidated data. Please click here to read more about these products, or contact us to discuss how we can help you.

Optimize my equipment availability

As an engineering manager, your role involves ensuring the efficient management of your equipment, minimising unplanned downtime. Engineering repair and maintenance work is mostly straightforward, if you have the spare parts!

	Click here to read why engineering is such a great profession

But how frustrating is it when you can't find the item you need, or are faced with long lead times for getting replacements while senior management is breathing down your neck to get the plant operational as quickly as possible?

Sometimes you may even have the spare parts in your store, but don’t know it because the descriptive data is poor, or the wrong part number has been entered, or there is no bill of materials. CMMS and ERP systems have been designed to capture maintenance activity and rarely provide well structured, searchable description of your spares. sparesFinder have developed Masterpiece and Gatekeeper to let you create and maintain a really valuable materials database so the same spare part is described in the same way across your organisation.

However, when you want a simple to use, but very powerful search capability, our Virtual Pooled Inventory (VPI) software delivers this quickly and cost effectively. VPI is configured with rules to ensure that each user gets visibility of only those items that are immediately available for transfer to them, so time isn’t wasted trawling through catalogues and checking on stock levels.

Our VPI database contains up to date information on over one million items of stock, shared between co-operating companies worldwide. You can use VPI to create your own community of users, perhaps as an internal solution where a global view is not yet available, or a regional group of plants in the same industry sector, or even for your suppliers and distributors to increase your visibility of the supply chain. Using VPI gives you access to this previously hidden "horizontal” supply chain and, because you have access to this global pool, it reduces the risk posed to your enterprise by extended periods of downtime.

Please click here to read more about these products, or contact us to discuss how we can help you.

Show me a comprehensive solution

Master Data management, Data quality, Data governance, Data hub, Data cleaning – the latest software product needs a capital D somewhere or it won’t get past the vendor’s marketing manager! At sparesFinder we agree that good quality data is important, but have approached the problem from a business perspective, rather than as an IT challenge.

As you learn about our set of solutions you’ll see that we fully understand the principles behind data management and these principles are already embedded within our suite of applications, delivering a complete solution to materials managers.

We believe the complexities, data structures and data volumes that define a material item are very different from the rest of enterprise data, such as customer names and addresses. Too many other MDM solutions only provide useful business functionality after a great deal of configuration and development. Even then they leave the thorny subject of data cleaning as an implementation issue.

Our data cleaning and data governance applications, Masterpiece and Gatekeeper have been designed from the start to deliver an enterprise wide solution for materials data. They have to handle the requirements of creating a single item master internationally, across multiple languages and regions and deal with the complex workflow and approval processes required by the end users of spare parts. With materials data, inaccuracy is much more costly than a misspelt address.

If you want to learn more about how these products provide a comprehensive MDM solution for materials data click here, or contact us to arrange a demonstration.

Explain why SaaS is the best approach

Ever since sparesFinder’s first customer logged into VPI in 1998, we have been providing what is now fashionably called a “Software as a Service” (SaaS, typically pronounced 'sass') solution, i.e. where the application and data are hosted and customers simply login via a web browser over the Internet. This model of software deployment was the only viable option for a service that included many different companies sharing information between them, but we have continued to use it as we’ve developed our application suite because it offers our customers so many advantages, such as:

• The up-front expense of software purchases is reduced through less costly, subscription based pricing.
• The need to install and run the application on your own computers is eliminated. SaaS alleviates the burden of software maintenance, ongoing operation and support.
• Investment in server hardware and related infrastructure is no longer required.
• New software releases and functionality becomes immediately available when published.

Industry trends also suggest that SaaS and its close cousin “cloud computing” are becoming increasingly accepted as the preferred option for many applications, especially in cost conscious times. However, if your company has particular sensitivity about the data being hosted and control of the application, we can accommodate this and provide assistance with specifying and costing alternative hosting and ownership options.

We have integrated our solutions at various levels with many of the leading ERP / CMMS systems, predominantly SAP, Oracle (J D Edwards) and Maximo. sparesFinder qualified as a “Powered by NetWeaver” SAP partner in August 2006, and continues to work with customers using many versions of SAP. ERP integration has varied from a simple regular file hand-off, conversion to iDocs for upload to SAP, through to a full portal-based workflow using 19 separate web services to control master data in 12 languages being fed to a multi-national customer’s ERP systems!

If you want to learn more about our products click here, or contact us to arrange a demonstration or get the answers to any technical questions you may have.