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When it comes to controlling costs in business we seldom use the obvious tactics, especially if the solution relies on cross-departmental efforts. It is always easier to control your own department’s costs from within than to gain consensus from other departments. As a result, we default to what we know best, standard department cost reductions. But does this really make the biggest impact for the company? 

One example is Direct Material Cost, the cost of raw materials and components used to create a product. It is the most significant cost in manufacturing and can represent 50% of revenue for manufacturing companies. Yet it is often ignored as an area of cost reduction, or worse each department will attempt to reduce this cost independent of the other groups resulting in marginal cost benefits and unsustainable solutions.

Reducing complexity of your direct material supplier parts can help drive significant savings within your company. Similar to our recently published blog which described the importance of conducting internal price benchmarking activities as a prerequisite to competitive benchmarking on a company’s direct material purchases. In both scenarios it’s surprising what you find when you are able to cleanse and enrich your purchase part data,  it can expose a variety of opportunities to reduce direct material spend without having to make major changes to your products. To reduce the complexity, we recommend grouping your direct material spend into these 3 groups:

Convergence Data knows the importance of your part data. We know that part data is a core asset for your company, and the quality of that data is fundamental to the health of the business and the bottom line. Start the new year right with a review of the best ways to get your data clean in 2017. Below is a recap of the top 2016 data quality blogs we published to help you stay on top of your company’s core assets in the New Year.

 Top 5 Data Quality Blogs of 2016:

Everyone is trying to determine what competitors are charging for their products through competitive benchmarking but will that really help you make a bigger profit? Maybe, but the real gold is in your existing purchase parts. Use the data you already have in house and compare purchased part costs that your company has incurred over the past two years. This data will allow you to truly increase your profit regardless of competitor pricing.   Price benchmarking looks outward but for optimal profit you must first look inward.

As Steven Covey noted in 7 Habits of Highly effective people  you should begin with the end in mind.  When starting a direct materials data cleansing project, you need to ask yourself, what is the goal of improving the direct materials data?  Cost savings? Sourcing efficiency? Improved insight through reporting and analysis?  To answer these questions and achieve success, engineering and procurement need to work together to obtain the answers. First you need to know what are the overall company goals? From there all the following questions can be answered.

You have heard it a million times before, garbage in garbage out, but how do you prevent bad data from going into your key systems like Teamcenter?  The answer is actually easier than you would expect, pre-planning, organizing classification models, and some up front data cleaning in a staging environment is the key.  Whether you are migrating several systems to one existing system or doing a new migration you should have a staging system (figure 1) where you consolidate classification structures, harvest and enrich data then normalize and validate the data.