Three weeks before go-live, the materials manager at a 280-person pump manufacturer printed the item master. It came out at 6,900 active part numbers. She expected about 2,900.
Nobody had done anything wrong on purpose. Ten years of “just add a new number, it’s faster than fixing the old one” had quietly piled up. In ERP Consulting, this is the single most common reason a project date slips.
What 6,900 part numbers actually costs you
We pulled a sample of 400 records and had two buyers classify them by hand. 1,900 of the 6,900 were true duplicates — same spec, same vendor, different number. Another 640 were dead: no purchase, no sale, no movement in 24 months.
The damage shows up in odd places. Roughly 11% of purchase orders in the prior year had gone to a secondary vendor record for the same part, at an average 7% higher price. That is real money, and it never appears on a project risk log.
- Freeze new item creation 60 days before go-live. One form, one approver, one reason code.
- Sort records by spend, not by count. The top 20% of parts by spend usually hides 80% of the duplicate damage.
- Give the cleanup team a hard target: 120 records per person per day, with a second person spot-checking 10%.
- Publish the kill list — the 640 dead numbers — to purchasing and sales before you delete anything.
The part that most teams skip
Cleaning the data is the easy half. The hard half is changing the behavior that created it. If a buyer can still create a part number in 40 seconds with no check, you will be back to 6,900 within three years.
On this project we added one rule: any new item request had to name an existing similar item and say why it wasn’t good enough. Requests dropped from about 90 a month to 12. That single form saved more money than the entire cleanup.
What to do this week
- Export your active item list and count how many records had zero transactions in the last 12 months. If it’s above 8%, you have a cleanup project, not a data migration task.
- Pick 50 duplicate-looking pairs and check the last purchase price on each. Multiply the gap by annual volume. That number is your business case.
- Write the one-page new-item rule before go-live, not after. Post-dated rules get ignored.
The lesson from this go-live: data quality is not an IT chore, it is a purchasing negotiation. Budget 3 weeks and 5 people for a company this size — and put the freeze in place before anyone opens the migration tool. Good ERP Consulting always starts with the messy list, never with the software.