
Key facts:
- 13 000 Employees
- 75 Power Stations
- Canadian Crown Corporation
- Live with Refresh Desktop
- 600 000 SKU's in scope
- ERP systems: Passport, SAP, IBM Maximo
Business Challenge
This Canadian Power Company manages some 600 000 MRO materials and services across multiple ERP systems and 75 locations. An in-house strategic P2P (procure to pay) initiative aimed to identify and categorize most materials and services procurement lines using the United Nations Standard Products and Services Code (UNSPSC). UNSPSC was to be mapped to each of the 600 000 Materials and Services and then updated in Passport, Maximo and SAP to facilitate:
• consistent, accurate and uniform tracking of company spend across all company divisions, suppliers and systems;
• easy company-wide visibility of all items, MRO in particular;
• cost-effective strategic procurement optimization;
• full utilization of electronic commerce capabilities; and
• the further development of strategies, benchmarks & analytics for strategic sourcing & due diligence (e.g. spend by item, spend by vendor, spend by category).
The main initial challenge was: how best to correctly and consistently manage 600 000 materials and services by assigning UNSPSC codes for each, across all 75 sites? A detailed public RFQ was issued seeking software including automating this UNSPSC assignment by:
• Extracting the data from Passport, Maximo & SAP;
• Automatically mapping existing codes to UNSPSC codes;
• Cleansing the data and removing duplicates;
• Suggesting alternate codes if there is no exact match; and
• Validating the data before uploading the codes.
After a detailed comparison of the software and services vendors in the Cataloguing / Data Quality space (including sample cleansing of thousands of real MRO materials), Refresh™ from Fresh International was selected for the job.
The Solution
Refresh Desktop was deployed within one week of purchase so the assignment of classifications could start quickly. Technically, the local project team did a fantastic job adding Refresh as a virtual app to all network users as well as providing valuable feedback to Fresh International to rapidly deliver a customized Refresh layout for quickly matching multiple variable UNSPSC’s.
But the most impressive job was done by the local project team and the business users in the actual assignment of the correct UNSPSC code for each ERP material. The bulk of this material matching job was completed in record time by sharing out the work and using the automating functions inside Refresh, particularly the shared custom dictionary.
Key Business Benefits
- IT lowest total cost of ownership: fully re-used ERP’s
- Trustworthy Spend Visibility & Spend Analysis
- Reduced working capital, duplicates and obsoletes
- Cross-Site Spend Transparency allows better bundling
- Easy to find materials in SAP, Maximo, and Passport
- A strong foundation for continuous improvement in P2P