MRO stands for Maintenance, Repair and Operations, most commonly relating to the operations of process plants in industries such as Oil & Gas, Food and Beverages, Pharmaceuticals, Chemicals Mining, Power, Utilities etc.
MRO materials (also known as indirect materials) are most often spare parts for equipment used in a process plant, such as pumps, compressors, conveyors or other equipment. MRO also refers to consumables such as cleaning supplies, plant upkeep supplies such as lubricants, and activities completed to restore or maintain the functioning of needed equipment, which are MRO services.
MRO capital and recurring expenses account for anywhere between 20 to 45% of the company’s costs, particularly in asset-intensive industries like Oil and Gas. Addressing it appropriately has resulted in significant revenue gains for companies, while ignoring it, has resulted in increased maintenance costs, plant shutdowns, reduced reliability, and high procurement and inventory costs.
The term UNSPSC stands for United Nations Standard Products and Services Code (UNSPSC). UNSPSC is a globally recognized taxonomy of products and services, primarily for use in eCommerce, developed and published by the United Nations. There are over 150000 codes available in UNSPSC, structured in a four-level hierarchy, coded as an eight-digit number, with an optional fifth level adding two more digits. Visit www.unspsc.org for more details.
UNSPSC enables supply chain and strategic sourcing teams to accurately classify and analyze the expenses for materials and services. Understanding the spending pattern for something like MRO materials or spares can increase the depth of spend analytics and help you reduce procurement costs, improve plant reliability, eliminate overstock, optimize maintenance costs and lower logistics and warehousing costs.
Simply put, ‘to avoid revenue leakage’, caused by – higher procurement costs, operational downtime, increased maintenance labor costs, increased inventory, higher warehousing costs, and increased logistics costs. And ‘not leaving money on the table’ via – intelligent use of MRO parts data, to create reliable maintenance schedules, maintaining optimal stock levels and optimizing procurement. Often, just duplicate line items can cost organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars in inventory costs.
Enventure capitalizes on three areas to provide accurate, and updated MRO material database. i.e. 1) MRO commodity expertise 2) AI-based proprietary platform for data cleansing and enrichment and 3) Reference database of millions of clean parts. The core technology takes care of deduplication, commodity segmentation, UNSPSC Classification, accurate and consistent data taxonomies, and a library of parts, while a 100% quality check is done by domain experts.
After an onetime cleanup, the key to maintaining data quality is Master Data Governance. This calls strictly following the master data quality standards and business rules defined. Enventure provides Master Data Governance as a managed service, via the Partlinq MDG™ platform. This enables you to no longer worry about ongoing data quality, as we have professional catalogers who will take care of all the master data additions, keeping the data accurate and consistent. The system can also be integrated into major ERP and EAM/CMMS systems like SAP, IBM Maximo, Oracle, etc.
Leveraging MRO data to improve plant reliability calls for seamless integration of how MRO data (material data and transactional data) is accessed and used across several functions – sourcing, purchasing, maintenance, and stores. Maintenance and reliability engineers always dread a situation where they have a need for a particular MRO part, but it is not available in stock. The key is to enhance and analyze the data, so reordering points can be defined clearly and inventory levels optimized, so that the maintenance strategy and RCM plans can be built based on specific historic data points and not assumptions.
An Equipment Bill of Materials (EBOM), consists of all the replaceable spares or components of equipment, which may be individual parts, assemblies or sub-assemblies. The parts in the Equipment BOM can be mapped to the ERP system, so that item purchase codes can be associated to each equipment or asset, making it easier for maintenance to order parts when needed. The EBOM usually has a hierarchical structure, to make identification of parts easier.
Enventure takes a multipronged approach to create Equipment BOMs. While in some cases, the BOM can be built based on the technical documentation from the OEM, in some cases, the OEM may have to be contacted to collect information. We have also developed a methodology to build EBOMs based on data available in the EAM/CMMS system, as well as the ERP system.
Both FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis), and FMECA (Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis) are methodologies to identify potential failure modes for an asset, to assess the risk associated with those failure modes, to rank issues by importance, and to identify and carry out corrective actions. The following information is required to be identified in both FMEA and FMECA: