Item Lifecycle Management
What is it?
There is a lifecycle to all equipment or assets; they are commissioned, operated and taken out of service. The same cycle applies to parts – items are created, attributes changed and ultimately removed from the catalogue. These transitions represent an Item Lifecycle.
All businesses manage the item lifecycle to some degree using either offline tools or core ERP Master Data Management functionality, but will tend to focus on a relatively small set of core attributes and at the “creation” or origination phase.
Once an item is created, it will typically be maintained into perpetuity with little or no modification and, as time goes on, may be duplicated. Furthermore, with few exceptions, the information captured at item creation is principally descriptive in nature with limited reflection of the operating context or criticality of the item to ongoing operations.
A lack of ongoing item maintenance combined with limited operational information undermines the value of insights to be gain for subsequent analysis or the ability to actively maintain the catalogue to assure relevancy.
Our web-native solution is configured to enable creation of new item master records that respect a standard taxonomy and ensure all the necessary data is captured and uploaded into your system of record efficiently.
Embedded workflow provides the necessary user-defined routing logic for multiple approvals prior to creation of the final item upload file. Authorized users are also able to amend data records to reflect data such as superseded Manufacturer Part Numbers, specification changes or item status codes.
Supporting metrics provide insight into approval cycle times, outstanding requests and lifecycle profile in addition to other reports designed to help you efficiently measure the health of your item catalogue.
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Efficient catalogue maintenance, avoiding the complexity of multi-screen set up processes indicative of many transactional systems.
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Ability to capture and maintain data attributes such as item criticality, material substitutions and other key data elements through a common interface.
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Customizable “rule based” workflow to route data change approvals.
