Achieve lower levels of working capital

While trimming operating costs is important, savings measures often just postpone marginal activities, so your business can often suffer by either growing less quickly or delivering more slowly. Reducing your working capital, however, is the gift that keeps giving, with lower debt charges accruing and compounding year after year. A saving in working capital is not just an accounting trick, but represents real cash savings.

Engineering spares inventory is a significant source of working capital for many of our customers, and one that offers a large opportunity for reduction. The challenge is to reduce your spares holdings without compromising on equipment availability or increasing risk of downtime.

sparesFinder provides a series of solutions that address this directly, leveraging our software applications and working with skilled consulting and service company partners to deliver you sustainable opportunities to reduce your spares inventory.

All of our applications contribute to the challenge, with Masterpiece and Gatekeeper getting your materials data in shape and keeping it well managed, so you are not wasting your capital on holding duplicate spares. Insight is the analytical tool that will show you where you can reduce you stock levels both at a single plant and across a group of plants. Finally, VPI provides visibility of holdings across a much wider resource pool, allowing you to share the capital cost of high value, slow moving spares held in common with your VPI partners, be they companies in your own organisation, industry sector, regional group, or key supply chain partners.

If you want to talk more about how we can help to reduce your working capital please contact us, or click here to read more about our set of solutions.

Get, keep and distribute high quality master data

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.

Consolidate the supply chain and reduce costs

Many forward looking companies have been working on optimising their supply chain and have addressed the opportunities to manage their direct materials more efficiently. When it comes to indirect spend, however, the control processes become more complex and number of suppliers to deal with increases. The MRO and spare parts supply chain is probably the toughest to get right. Not only are there a great number of spare parts manufacturers and vendors to manage, but they can’t be easily discarded. Each one offers unique knowledge and the potential to provide essential advice and specialist supplies to your engineers.

sparesFinder offers a deep understanding of the MRO supply chain and have used this knowledge to build our systems and processes to help you understand your true position and negotiate from a position of strength. Masterpiece is our data cleaning application that will allow you to build your data foundation, with a single record for a single manufactured part. It lets you see through the confusion created by multiple vendor references used at your various sites for the same original part, one of the greatest sources of cost inflation. To leverage this high quality data, we offer Insight, our analytical and reporting system that combines high quality master data with transactional data from multiple sources to give you the consolidated picture you need.

While we can provide you with the essential data and information to run a supply rationalisation project, we also understand delivery is a significant challenge, and have therefore built partnerships with some of the largest distributors and procurement specialists in Europe and the USA in order to provide a comprehensive solution to our joint customers.

Please contact us to learn more about how we can offer a complete solution for your supply chain project, or click here to learn more about our Masterpiece and Insight applications.

Build solid data foundations for the new ERP/CMMS

IT systems evolve and develop over time and before long the features of a new or rival version of your ERP or CMMS system become too compelling to ignore. Or it could be that you’ve just merged with another company and one of the key justifications behind the merger is the opportunity to consolidate operational processes and reduce the combined cost base.

Whatever the reason, your organisation is going to invest in upgrading its management systems, and it’s a significant, resource-draining project. One of the biggest headaches is getting the data from different systems aligned and loaded into the new system.

You may have already purchased ETL software (Extract, Transform and Load) to help you, but if your original data quality is poor, pushing it into your new system is akin to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. A system change is one of the best opportunities to upgrade your master data, but all too often companies fail to do this, leaving insufficient time and budget to complete more than a cursory data ETL project, completely undermining their huge investment in the system; to continue the nautical analogy, they spoil the ship for a ha'porth of tar!

sparesFinder’s Masterpiece application is designed to handle the complexities of a materials data cleaning project that supports system upgrade projects of any size. It has been used by visionary companies to build a solid data foundation for projects ranging from a few plants to global rollouts of major ERP systems across multiple countries and languages, involving millions of item master records.

Our data cleaning process and the power of our software is best understood with a demonstration, so please contact us to arrange this, or click here to learn more about Masterpiece.