75k SKUs of a centralized catalogue cleansed for an international mining company

CLIENT

An international mining company with several assets across various countries had a centralized catalogue with more than 75,000 SKUs. The lack of necessary information for existing items and misaligned processes for new item creation had resulted in several duplicated SKUs, inflated warehouse inventories and excessive purchases.

ACTIONS TAKEN

1. We used our master data cleansing techniques to process data with automatic and manual methodologies
2. A decision support matrix for resolving the handling of duplicates was developed and applied, using inventories, requests and open orders as feeds
3. Missing data in SKU data sets was added into the catalogue from several sources, such as manufacturers' catalogs and online resources, using automated tools

RESULTS ACHIEVED

• 60,000 SKUs were normalized according to the approved data standards and enriched with additional data
• 4,000 items were identified as duplicates, with half of that removed as redundant SKUs. The process of defining reference items was automated and reduced from one week of manual effort to three minutes
• The items catalogue was reduced by 19% in size