A recently merged multi-national Fortune 500 company with two US subsidiaries and MRO category spend in four different business units was attempting to develop a coordinated post-merger sourcing strategy. The relevant MRO inventory data resided in different ERP systems (PeopleSoft and Oracle) and included different defined fields and levels of detail in the data. MRO data was classified under several different sub-category structures, and obtaining a consolidated report of the usage, item availability, and spend within each sub-category was extremely difficult. The expectation following the merger was that there would be a combined and coordinated category sourcing strategy resulting in significant savings to the merged company.

For over 80,000 items in inventory, the client used tools such as Access and Excel to analyze the information and made little progress in combining and sorting through the vast amounts of data. The delay in completing this analysis was also postponing the realization of the anticipated benefits from the coordinated sourcing strategy.

Although inventory data residing in ERP systems can be sorted, linked, and analyzed for procurement or sourcing related efforts, many companies have admitted that it is difficult to get the right data fields exported and fully analyzed for a strategic sourcing effort. Additionally, many companies do not have the resources with the core competency to perform a detailed spend analysis. Other daunting challenges faced by the client were different naming conventions and incomplete data records which required filling-in gaps in information. The datasets also contained a large number of linked fields and manually linking these fields was very resource intensive and difficult.

Enporion took an innovative approach to address the client’s challenges. The strategy was to standardize all the inventory data first and create a new dataset within Enporion’s Spend Tool that combined all the different data from different sources into a single dataset. Standardization efforts included extracting manufacturer and part number detail from item descriptions, as well as matching fields from different data sources that may have different names but contain the same data, etc.  This single combined dataset would keep intact all the existing relationships and their inherent characteristics while also displaying unrelated/unique data within the same environment. Unique to Enporion’s solution is that users can pull up different multi-dataset views concurrently for side-by-side comparisons. To this consolidated dataset, Enporion developed a unifying category/sub-category structure for MRO and then imported spend data from accounts payable to develop the usage and pricing information for the MRO category items.

A new “Sourcing Category” structure was implemented within the spend management tool for the consolidated dataset that linked and combined the various complete and incomplete category structures from the different sources of data. The strategy of standardizing inventory data across the business units and linking to actual spend data from the accounts payable system gave the client visibility of the items within a sub-category being held at each of its business units, the spend associated with that sub-category, and the prices paid to the suppliers by each business unit.

Enporion developed detailed category reports showing the items, suppliers, and manufacturers mapped to each category along with the prices paid and all the suppliers providing the same item or material. Detailed reports and analyses for identifying and pursuing savings opportunities were developed including items provided by only one manufacturer (sole-sourced) and items purchased directly from the manufacturer. Enporion delivered a reporting template to quickly leverage spend across the different business units by automatically creating market baskets for sub-categories of MRO spend. Armed with this information and analysis, the client is currently pursuing their coordinated sourcing strategy for MRO across the enterprise.

The result of Enporion’s work was a complete harmonization of the different inventory and transaction data sources to give the client a comprehensive dataset containing all their procurement-related data in one place with all the fields correctly linked, and spend mapped to a unified commodity structure. Enporion’s analyses and reports are being used in the development of the domestic and global sourcing strategy for specific MRO categories and to generate the merger synergies (both cost savings and process efficiencies) that were envisioned for the merged companies’ MRO procurement operations. The anticipated ROI for this effort based on the savings in year one is expected to well exceed five times the investment.