Speaking at the US API/PIDX fall member meet in Houston last month, Raul Rom outlined Riversand’s work on master data and inventory/spares management for ConocoPhillips. The company was trying to implement a single global instance of SAP to span its worldwide operations and $188 billion revenues. A global purchase to pay project was kicked off in 2007 to reduce ‘free form’ purchases and manual intervention in transactions. The project was six months behind schedule—partly because of data conversion issues and change management issues as business continuity was essential throughout the project.
The solution was the restructuring of ConocoPhillips’ catalog to align with the PIDX classification and schema along with the development of processes and tools for ongoing catalog management. An idea of the scale of the task can be had from a few statistics. Some 1.2 million items were catalogued with 3,400 templates. On average each catalog item had around 20 attributes. The task involved the creation or modification of 3,000 PIDX templates. Finally, the process successfully matched some 200,000 individual free text purchase orders.
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