The biggest cause of unnecessary increases in material stock is the proliferation of new codes in ERP master data. There many reasons for this: new machines, production lines, product models, and company acquisitions and mergers, are all factors that generate new codes in the ERP. New codes automatically mean new physical warehouse items (SKUs) with their associated purchase and storage costs.
But do we really need to create all these new items? Might we already have some of them in stock? If we do, how can we locate the duplicates in one or more databases with different codes, descriptions, and even different languages? ERPs do not hold the answer; they are only designed to record data without checking its quality or completeness.
Technical Attributes Management (TAM) is an application specifically designed to solve this problem by using semantics technology to identify SKUs that might be ‘the same:’
Step 1: Use semantics to classify master data into a single ‘by nature’ taxonomy, ignoring the original codes or languages.
Step 2: Extract all of the technical attributes, mostly from the descriptions, and automatically normalize them.
Step 3: Enrich the data with information captured from outside sources, such as catalogues and technical spec sheets.
Semantic technology performs these steps automatically and allows TAM to aggregate the SKUs that have the same technical attribute values. Not only can we eliminate duplicates in existing data, with the immediate benefit of reducing SKUs, but we can also prevent new duplicates from being created in the future.
For a company that has global reach, it can be a challenge to manage all master data and have a clear picture of everything within your organization. With new master data codes, the odds of creating duplicate entries increase. Creatives’ Semantic Technology allows us to automatically reconstruct your company’s master data from currently available data, whether it is structured or not. Once the data has been reconstructed, the software will continue to expand on the ontology of your master data.
In addition, companies can use information or catalogues from websites to help enrich the descriptions of items, giving them the same appeal as the typical search engine.
Creactives software introduces ‘human-like’ reasoning to help you better understand your material master data.
You will no longer be plagued by duplicate stock or complaints from finance about unnecessary purchases. Creatives’ Product Master Data Suite is perfectly designed to manage material master data, and, as a consequence, it eliminates the possibility of overstocking, saving you money in the process.
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