Industry-leading strategic MRO Solutions Combine to Power the
Industrial Supply Chain

Louisville, KY – April 22^nd, 2024 – Net Results Group, a leading provider of data management solutions, announces the release of MRO3i for IBM Maximo, a ground-breaking solution designed to transform MRO inventory management and drive efficiency across asset-intensive industries.

“Net Results Group has always delivered high-quality solutions that meet the needs of asset-intensive organizations,” commented Lance Gilbert, Managing Partner of Net Results Group. “MRO3i for IBM Maximo takes this one step further, keeping us at the forefront of MRO technological advancement while fulfilling the master data management needs of a robust EAM install base. This represents a significant leap forward in efficiently managing our Maximo clients’ business requirements and facilitating informed, timely decisions.”

“The release of MRO3i for IBM Maximo aligns perfectly with our vision to empower industrial collaboration,” added Jennifer Beushausen, Director of Business Development at Net Results Group. “We have the technology and expertise to address the challenges facing capital asset-intensive industries and connect all participants in the industrial value chain. IBM Maximo’s proven ability to extend asset life and decrease operating costs makes it an ideal platform for our MRO3i solution, providing a missing link in many clients’ MRO platforms.”

Why MRO3i for IBM Maximo?

– IBM Maximo is the industry standard for Enterprise Asset Management (EAM).

– Net Results Group is an IBM Maximo Business Partner, offering certified reseller and embedded solution provider services.

– MRO3i’s track record in creating value for asset-intensive industries through extended asset life and reduced operating costs complements IBM Maximo’s capabilities.

– The integration of MRO3i with IBM Maximo facilitates real-time data exchange, providing seamless connectivity and enabling efficient supplier collaboration.

Key Features of MRO3i for IBM Maximo:

– Seamless integration via API Web call Interface, operating 24/7.

– Real-time data exchange facilitated by the Maximo integration framework.

– Scalable architecture designed to handle thousands of active users.

– Offerings include SaaS solutions, data governance tools, inventory, consulting, and master data services.

Net Results Group’s MRO3i for IBM Maximo release marks a significant advancement in MRO inventory management, providing asset-intensive industries with the tools they need to enhance operational efficiency, reduce costs, and drive sustainable growth.

For more information about MRO3i for IBM Maximo, visit www.netresultsgroup.com.

Marketing Contact:

Alexa Hurban

Director of Marketing

ahurban@netresultsgroup.com

Our solution:
Net Results Group built BOMs quickly and accurately using its MRO3i tool and the “Where Used” exercise of walking down the company’s storeroom, itemizing spare parts and assigning them to an asset hierarchy constructed specifically for the company. During this process, the company did NOT need to stop production, and the MRO3i tool captured each part’s information with absolute certainty regarding its technical attributes. Without shutting down production, between 75-85% of each equipment’s total parts were itemized. A short shut-down allowed the remaining 15-25% to be captured – an exercise that can typically be completed during a regularly scheduled preventative maintenance (PM) outage.

Outcome:
There was no guessing by the person identifying the parts about each part’s attribute – each attribute’s data descriptions were made standard and consistent. The tool instantly recognized and assigned the part number to all associated assets. With MRO3i, building a BOM was efficient, user-friendly, and unquestionably accurate. The “Where Used” exercise ensured PM outages were even briefer due to the highly accurate input obtained from the MRO3i tool. Return on investment was realized by parts being issued accurately and found quickly in the storerooms during every future PM.

NRG Managing Partner, Lance Gilbert, will be presenting at the 2020 SMRP Annual Conference on Tuesday, October 20. His presentation, “Data Mining and Visualization to Promote MRO Excellence” is on the Emerging Technologies Track, and will take place 3:15-4:15pm. He will be co-presenting with current NRG client, Rhonda Wentzloff, TPM Manager at Clarios. Below is the topic summary:

The extraction and application of historical process data has proven its worth in nearly every process-based industry, yet the value of data science for MRO eludes many firms. Why? MRO personnel may not recognize its importance, or they may not have time or expertise to invest in data science, including CMMS modifications. In worst-case scenarios, the entire operation is purely reactive, fighting emergencies rather than using data to avoid them. This presentation will explore why data science has become crucial to compete and thrive in modern process-based facilities and will outline steps for developing a functional data science program.

Don’t miss it! Register here for the virtual conference if you haven’t already.

When a manufacturer in the Building Products Industry realized its MRO inventories were growing at an unacceptable pace, and annual spend on MRO indirect materials was not being controlled, management wished to take action. The manufacturer thought its MRO inventory contained many obsolete items that could not be identified and were deteriorating while sitting in inventory. Cost was difficult to manage, as the company did not have any insight into the exact items it was purchasing due to inaccurate MRO item descriptions in the master catalogue.

Various critical issues related to their MRO, including an incomplete bill of materials (BOMs) for its assets, were also causing costs to spiral unnecessarily with uncontrollable stock and non-stock items. Due to poor MRO item descriptions, maintenance and operations teams had low confidence in the parts that were already assigned to the assets.

Facilitating a Solution

The company engaged Net Results Group to develop and implement initiatives to improve MRO practices and bring costs down.

The first step in the process was to create a project and business plan during a two-day planning session. Facilitated by Net Results Group, it included key stakeholders from the client company. The project plan developed into multiple workstreams:

• Approve NRG’s data dictionary of 5,000-plus noun/modifier templates for item master design.
• Cleanse and enrich item records remotely.
• Identify item records that had little information in the description and could not be cleansed remotely.
• Walk down storerooms in three plants to cleanse and enrich items where a remote effort was not possible or practical. Also, assign appropriate min/max values for each item.
• Once cleansing was completed, identify duplicate MRO item catalogue numbers and process the duplicates as inactive items to ensure item history was maintained.
• Load the new data into the JD Edwards ERP/EAM system.
• Start the process of assigning items to assets (BOMs) for all three plants.
• Identify parts on BOMs that are stock and non-stock.
• Complete BOMs and identify as obsolete those MRO items not assigned to an asset.
• Create and execute a plan to recover the value of obsolete parts.

Critical Project Results Produce Bottom-Line Benefits

The project was a success with numerous critical results:

• The storerooms of MRO items were all organized and secured.
• Inventory of existing items decreased by 11%.
• Items on BOMs that were necessary to stock were added to inventory, thus reducing production downtime significantly.
• First-year MRO purchase costs were reduced by 26% as a result of improved overstock inventory positions and enhanced buying power with vendors.
• Ongoing MRO materials costs were reduced 16% due to improved buying power with vendors.
• Maintenance productivity increased 20% as technicians spent more time turning wrenches rather than looking for the right parts.
• Master data of MRO materials resulted in accurate descriptions, and the procedures to maintain the data to keep it cleansed and relevant are being followed.

In the final analysis, the company achieved all of its MRO goals for this project. More importantly, it realized a return on investment (ROI) in excess of 20%.

LOUISVILLE, KY – Oct. 14, 2021 – Net Results Group, a leader specializing in MRO master data management for more than 25 years, today announced Managing Partner Lance Gilbert and long-standing Net Results Group customer Ben Borgmeyer, Strategic Project Manager at Saint-Gobain/CertainTeed Gypsum will be presenting at the 2021 SMRP Annual Conference on Tuesday, October 26 from 2:45-3:45 PM in Room 104/105. Gilbert will also be demonstrating Net Results Group’s MRO3i MRO master data technology suite and its enhanced feature set, showcasing the bottom-line benefits it provides.

This much anticipated session will explore the specifics of how Net Results Group’s MRO3i solution led to CertainTeed Gypsum’s extraordinary success. The presentation will also address the importance of proper data governance and how MRO3i supports ongoing sustainability and high-quality data.

“Virtually all manufacturing experts recognize that improved decision making for reliability leads to a higher rate of manufacturing uptime that produces hard-dollar savings,” said Mr. Gilbert. “Yet, many companies are still uncertain how to achieve these wins. We look forward to sharing Saint-Gobain/CertainTeed Gypsum’s success story with attendees, including key details of how any firm can leverage MRO3i’s capabilities to cleanse, standardize and enrich data, expedite bill of materials creation for critical assets, and much more.”

Sponsored by non-profit Society for Maintenance & Reliability Professionals (SMRP), the SMRP Annual Conference is a signature event that attracts more than 1,200 maintenance, reliability and physical asset management professionals and practitioners each year.

About Net Results Group

Net Results Group, LLC is a technology-focused consulting firm with a comprehensive offering for significantly improving MRO master data. Headquartered in Louisville, KY, the firm was founded in 1996 with the goal of being THE MRO master data governance expert. The firm’s unique combination of asset expertise, reliability services and tools – including its cloud-based MRO3i technology suite – enables it to help asset-intensive organizations make intelligent use of their data. Professional services, including onsite and virtual walkdowns and assessments, also inform storeroom optimization and MRO inventory control to sharpen purchasing strategies, reduce operational costs, increase uptime and improve service levels. For more information, visit http://www.netresultsgroup.com.

About CertainTeed

Through the responsible development of innovative and sustainable building products, CertainTeed, headquartered in Malvern, Pennsylvania, has helped shape the building products industry for more than 110 years. Founded in 1904 as General Roofing Manufacturing Company, the firm’s slogan “Quality Made Certain, Satisfaction Guaranteed,” inspired the name CertainTeed. Today, CertainTeed is a leading North American brand of exterior and interior building products, including roofing, siding, solar, fence, decking, railing, trim, insulation, drywall and ceilings. From economical acoustical tiles and suspension systems to custom-engineered ceilings showpieces in metal, felt, fiberglass, and wood, the CertainTeed Architectural (US) and CertainTeed Architectural Products (Canada) portfolio includes solutions for every space and every budget – all with the backing of technical expertise and world-class customer support that can help you unleash the creative potential of every project.

A subsidiary of Saint-Gobain, one of the world’s largest and oldest building products companies, CertainTeed has more than 6,900 employees and more than 60 manufacturing facilities throughout the United States and Canada. The group had total sales of approximately $4.1 billion in 2019. www.certainteed.com.

When a manufacturer in the Building Products Industry realized its MRO inventories were growing at an unacceptable pace, and annual spend on MRO indirect materials was not being controlled, management wished to take action. The manufacturer thought its MRO inventory contained many obsolete items that could not be identified and were deteriorating while sitting in inventory. Cost was difficult to manage, as the company did not have any insight into the exact items it was purchasing due to inaccurate MRO item descriptions in the master catalogue.

Various critical issues related to their MRO, including an incomplete bill of materials (BOMs) for its assets, were also causing costs to spiral unnecessarily with uncontrollable stock and non-stock items. Due to poor MRO item descriptions, maintenance and operations teams had low confidence in the parts that were already assigned to the assets.

Facilitating a Solution

The company engaged Net Results Group to develop and implement initiatives to improve MRO practices and bring costs down.

The first step in the process was to create a project and business plan during a two-day planning session. Facilitated by Net Results Group, it included key stakeholders from the client company. The project plan developed into multiple workstreams:

• Approve NRG’s data dictionary of 5,000-plus noun/modifier templates for item master design.
• Cleanse and enrich item records remotely.
• Identify item records that had little information in the description and could not be cleansed remotely.
• Walk down storerooms in three plants to cleanse and enrich items where a remote effort was not possible or practical. Also, assign appropriate min/max values for each item.
• Once cleansing was completed, identify duplicate MRO item catalogue numbers and process the duplicates as inactive items to ensure item history was maintained.
• Load the new data into the JD Edwards ERP/EAM system.
• Start the process of assigning items to assets (BOMs) for all three plants.
• Identify parts on BOMs that are stock and non-stock.
• Complete BOMs and identify as obsolete those MRO items not assigned to an asset.
• Create and execute a plan to recover the value of obsolete parts.

Critical Project Results Produce Bottom-Line Benefits

The project was a success with numerous critical results:

• The storerooms of MRO items were all organized and secured.
• Inventory of existing items decreased by 11%.
• Items on BOMs that were necessary to stock were added to inventory, thus reducing production downtime significantly.
• First-year MRO purchase costs were reduced by 26% as a result of improved overstock inventory positions and enhanced buying power with vendors.
• Ongoing MRO materials costs were reduced 16% due to improved buying power with vendors.
• Maintenance productivity increased 20% as technicians spent more time turning wrenches rather than looking for the right parts.
• Master data of MRO materials resulted in accurate descriptions, and the procedures to maintain the data to keep it cleansed and relevant are being followed.

In the final analysis, the company achieved all of its MRO goals for this project. More importantly, it realized a return on investment (ROI) in excess of 20%.

A food manufacturer was struggling to identify which MRO parts/materials in their storerooms were associated to their equipment/assets within their plants, which consisted of five manufacturing buildings on one campus. They solicited proposals to assist them in creating bills of materials (BOMs), specifically the need to assign item master parts to asset numbers. During the proposal stage, feedback from Net Results Group stopped them from moving forward with a very expensive implementation and ineffective project plan (as the plans proposed by various providers were incomplete).

The company was ready to embark on developing BOMs with toxic and unstandardized data in their MRO item master and it lacked an organized asset hierarchy for its plant assets parent-child relationships.

The company’s goals for this project included:

• Identifying every MRO part that was tied to their assets and the quantity of each part per asset.
• Determine which parts were not assigned to a BOM or no longer required and obsolete those parts, with a plan to optimize the value of obsolete parts through an organized parts dispositioning program.
• Better understand the true cost of running an asset, down to the lowest tier of the asset’s level.
• Provide a more efficient work order process to eliminate unproductive maintenance time that was wasted by not being able to identify the right part assigned to an asset and the asset’s location in the plant.

By moving ahead with their initial plan, the company would have taken over 27 months to complete the BOM exercise and would not have had accurate data records for its parts and assets. In addition, the company would not have been able to standardize the descriptions of its parts and assets across the campus, making it difficult to identify where sharing of parts throughout the different plants would have reduced demand purchases.

The company took a step back from the initial project and engaged Net Results Group to create and facilitate a planning session with the company’s key project stakeholders. This planning session not only identified an effective project plan complete with detailed implementation steps and timeline, but Net Results Group also identified with the stakeholders measurable key performance indicators that enabled us to create a business plan that identified a return on investment for the project of over 115%.

During implementation, the company utilized Net Results Group’s professional services and MRO3i^TM application that reduced the timeframe to just over 13 months, mainly due to the efficiency of using the MRO3i application. The full scope of the project went from what was initially only to create BOMs to a three-phase project:

• Develop asset hierarchies for each manufacturing building on the campus. This included standardized terminology for each level one through eight in the asset hierarchy and updating P&IDs for the plant equipment.
• Cleanse, standardize and enrich the MRO parts in the item master to ensure all items met the standardization criteria. It also eliminated duplicate items (items with the same manufacturer part number but with different item master numbers in their system). This enabled the company to reduce inventory values and lower the cost of annual purchases of MRO parts.
• Create BOMs by assigning the parts to the lowest level in the asset hierarchy (child level) along with quantities of each part required for each asset.

The company’s production lines are running more efficiently with higher uptime, and they are able to track costs of operating each asset, making it more accurate for them to perform ROIs for asset replacements.

Maintenance became more productive, work order information became more informative, Engineering was extremely pleased to have updated drawings on equipment, Finance was ecstatic to have the ability to better monitor costs of operations and lower inventory values, and finally Purchasing now had visibility into better purchasing insights, enabling them to attain stronger purchasing power with vendors.

Our experience in storerooms has revealed that:

• 67% of your MRO spare parts will not be used in the first 3 years;
• 30% of your MRO spare parts will never be used;
• At least 16% of your stock units are duplicated in your item master.

When proper methods are employed, inventory values can easily be reduced by up to 34%. For a typical storeroom with multiple SKU’s, eliminating inflated inventory values can return between $500k to $625k to the budget. Multiply this impact across multiple storerooms and the positive effect on the enterprise becomes significant.

Inventory carrying costs usually amount to 8% to 12% of inventory values. These hard-dollar expenses are very measurable, and minimizing them will have a substantial positive impact on a company’s bottom line.

Reducing inventory values is a methodical, practical activity, but company management must take extenuating factors into consideration and identify where these are impacting results. Examples include:

• Critical spares that may not move from inventory very often;
• Obsolete materials in inventory that are no longer used for an asset / equipment;
• Supplier lead time for stock units;
• Manufacturer’s discontinued part numbers that can no longer be ordered, in which case a cross reference to an equivalent form, fit, function part should be identified immediately;
• Demand forecasting based on usage data or other form of work order history.

All of these extenuating factors require recording, management, and potentially classification. Once this is achieved, the organization can approach them methodically to reduce inventory values. That process starts with quality item master data.

Once an organization has accurate data for both the item master and the asset master, and also has items accurately assigned to the equipment parts lists (“where used”), it will be able to extract more insights from the data.

In our experience firms that gain control of their data in this manner enjoy a ROI of 36%, at a minimum, with a payback period between 12 and 18 months.

To attain this level of accomplishment, we suggest:

• Start with a planning session involving key stakeholders.
• Create an implementation plan and business case with measurable KPIs.

A well-crafted plan enables managers and stakeholders to identify all the factors mentioned above and thereby to create a set of milestones and deliverables broken down by independent and interdependent steps.

The timeline and plan will be dictated by the amount of resources assigned, either internal or external professional services, to accomplish the tasks identified within each milestone.

The bottom line is that by focusing on indirect materials, immediate benefits are realized. Furthermore, a self-sustainable model can be implemented within the enterprise to ensure the sins of the past are not repeated.

LOUISVILLE, KY – Nov. 9, 2021 – Net Results Group, a leader specializing in MRO master data management for more than 25 years, today announced it is a finalist in the Software category for Plant Engineering magazine’s Product of the Year program. The annual readers’ choice award is widely recognized as the premier honor for new products in the manufacturing and industrial automation industries, and 2021 will mark 34 years of the Product of the Year program.

Net Results Group’s MRO3i 2.0 is a fully supported, cloud-based technology suite that equips companies with a complete workflow management solution for MRO master data transformation and ongoing governance. MRO3i 2.0 is faster, more affordable and flexible than its competitors and offers a feature-rich, responsive design on PCs, tablets and mobile devices.

“The development and launch of MRO3i 2.0 was a very rewarding process, as we worked closely with our customers to identify the benefits that would best assist them in realizing MRO excellence,” said Net Results Group Managing Partner Lance Gilbert. “Making the list of finalists demonstrates our continued technology innovation and business success in anticipating the growth needs of our customers.”

Plant Engineering announced the finalists on November 1, 2021, at which time subscribers could commence voting at www.plantengineering.com/poy. (The ballot closes March 11, 2022.) MRO3i 2.0 will also be listed as a finalist in the November/December issue of Plant Engineering, and winners will be announced on April 25, 2022, and listed in the May/June 2022 issue of Plant Engineering magazine.

Plant Engineering subscribers can vote for Product of the Year, here.

About Net Results Group

Net Results Group, LLC is a technology-focused consulting firm with a comprehensive offering for significantly improving MRO master data. Headquartered in Louisville, KY, the firm was founded in 1996 with the goal of being THE MRO master data governance expert. The firm’s unique combination of asset expertise, reliability services and tools – including its cloud-based MRO3i technology suite – enables it to help asset-intensive organizations make intelligent use of their data. Professional services, including onsite and virtual walkdowns and assessments, also inform storeroom optimization and MRO inventory control to sharpen purchasing strategies, reduce operational costs, increase uptime and improve service levels. For more information, visit http://www.netresultsgroup.com.

Because of this, companies are severely overinvested in spare parts. Failure to realize their strategic importance leads firms to experience incorrect inventory levels and inflated annual spend, directly impacting working capital and profitability as well as operational performance.

It’s important to recognize that companies experience a higher and more immediate hard dollar return from implementing MRO strategies, whereas results from MRO strategic initiatives go directly to the bottom line.

The question becomes, “Who owns this strategy and who in the organization should be held accountable for making it happen?”

As many company leaders discover, various audit points have exposed MRO material issues throughout the enterprise, creating a very large pain point especially for the CFO and Plant Controllers. Lack of any strategy leads to Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) exposure, significant expenditure in avoidable costs, and reduced operational efficiencies:

• Poor identification of MRO materials causes unnecessary higher annual spend, typically in the range of 16% to 23%.
• Incorrect order points, lead times, and order quantities cause inventory levels to be inflated, with levels growing 6.7% per year.
• MRO stock with values in the millions of dollars is unaccounted for throughout a plant (a major SOX issue).
• Unnecessary purchases are made each year due to poor inventory identification, which also results in unnecessary expedited shipping costs.
• 25% of maintenance time is wasted looking for the right part.
• Opportunities are missed to control other measurable financial and operational factors that could be eliminated with the proper oversight and strategies in place.

In 12 months or less, based on the enterprise’s size, a complete and optimized strategy for MRO can be implemented to deliver bottom line, multimillion-dollar savings. Returns on project investment often exceed 30%. A return of this size is significantly higher than any company’s cost of capital. Furthermore, it can all be accomplished while improving operational effectiveness and production up-time, making sure you remain a competitively low-cost operation.

MRO strategic initiatives must be developed as a comprehensive plan, but most importantly, they must be driven as a team effort by upper and middle management. This will ensure the initiatives undertaken are comprehensive, logical to implement, and sustainable. This approach will also confer accountability to a select few within the organization, typically in partnership with finance and operations.

Approaches to consider in your strategic plan include:

• Creating a comprehensive plan to deliver targeted MRO solutions that use industry-specific knowledge, encompasses a well-developed project plan along with critical measurable KPIs, and ensures optimal implementation with input from all stakeholders.
• Where necessary, cleansing and standardizing item descriptions across the enterprise item master to correct years of erroneous, obsolete and duplicate data. This will eliminate unnecessary inventory and leverage better information to reduce annual spend. It will also improve time spent by maintenance personnel.
• Implementing an ongoing data governance model to ensure data quality is sustained once the cleansing and standardization is complete to avoid corrupting the data again.
• Disposing of irrelevant inventory efficiently to recoup a high percentage of past capital investments.
• Creating perfect storerooms throughout the enterprise using industry best practices that optimize physical space and storeroom operating procedures.

Results expected from implementing this approach include but are not limited to:

• Reduced working capital funding requirements
• Lowered annual spend on inventory
• Reduced downtime by having the right part, at the right time, with the right quantity
• Strengthened controls to account for all inventory values
• Eliminating false stock out costs
• Significantly reduced shipping costs from greatly reduced emergency orders

As you may realize, these approaches impact many areas within an organization. This is why any MRO strategic plan must have the right ownership to be fully effective.

Asset-intensive companies that employ MRO strategies specific to their needs and processes are realizing these benefits quickly, making them increasingly competitive in their industry.

We have seen various organizational arrangements to ensure MRO strategy ownership not only has prominence within the organization but also is supported from the “C” suite, especially the CFO and COO/EVP of Operations.

Developing the comprehensive plan mentioned earlier provides the roadmap for upper and middle management to understand, buy into, and manage the strategy properly and efficiently. Depending on the culture of the organization, accountability for overseeing and implementing the strategy can be accomplished either through a steering team or by appointing one person to be the MRO strategy czar. Either way, the approved and often fluid roadmap must be created and monitored to ensure results are being realized in a timely and efficient manner.