As a well-known, Oil and Gas company with many operational assets in the Middle East, UK, Europe & Africa, this company runs a well-integrated and professional procure to pay process. As is typical in this asset-intensive industry there are many critical-to-maintain equipment, with the expected large number of purchases in the SAP ERP system skewed towards maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) needs. Furthermore, there are a large number of equipment and spare parts masters managed through the work order process in IBM’s Maximo to be maintained in technical detail.
Top management within both the purchasing and the maintenance departments felt that there existed a good opportunity to clean and enhance some key data this year in tandem with a planned upgrade to SAP HANA. The tasks identified which would provide the most savings opportunities were the following: 1) De-duplication of Material Masters, 2) Spend Classifying all purchases in SAP to UNSPSC as well as an Oil & Gas standard, and 3) re-describing spare parts to a noun+modifier+attribute naming convention for ease of search in SAP.
Refresh Desktop was selected to do this task semi-algorithmically in-house, operated part time by three existing members of the SAP & Maximo support team, who were all trained by Teams meetings over the course of Q1. The de-duplication work was performed by Fresh International remotely at the HQ in Switzerland as a pro-bono service. Refresh Server for SAP was also subsequently selected to perform the creation of each new material (and equipment and bill of material) inside SAP with the added option of Office integration and/or Neptune/Fiori for easy governance.
Over two quarters in 2024, all SAP and Maximo materials and services, will be commodity coded to UNSPSC, de-duplicated and re-described using Refresh’s built in naming templates covering some 5000 classes with 10-20 attributes per class. Enhancing all short, long and PO descriptions in this repeatable and expected manner, will allow for easy right-first-time searching and purchasing in SAP, thus enabling multinational Oil and Gas Exploration and Production, in a safe, socially responsible and economically sustainable manner.