UMMC is updating the directory of materials of the corporate information system to optimize procurement and inventory management processes. The new directory allows you to identify and describe even the most complex materials through their physical characteristics and structured names.
The materials directory is a small for the user, but fundamental for the corporate information system, a set of data about all materials, services, raw materials, equipment , goods, semi-finished products, finished products and everything material that UMMC organizations use in their activities. Everything that is produced, sold and used in UMMC is reflected in this reference book.
When working with a reference manual of materials, which is available to a large number of users, you always need a compromise between "fast" and "high quality". This compromise cannot be found without a single well-developed classification system that allows different descriptions of the same materials to be brought to a single logical language and characteristics. This is the language and classification that was developed by the specialists of the technical and financial director service of UMMC with the participation of a number of company services.
According to the chief specialist of the UMMC financial director service Lyubov Pestereva, the project was complex, but interesting ... “For me, the experience of working in the direction of material classification was new on such a scale, but this is what allowed me to treat the assigned project with maximum responsibility. Based on the results of the work carried out, I can note that the work on updating the classification of materials for the needs of the UMMC must be carried out daily, and the corporate directory of materials is able to settle the interests of many services working in various areas on a number of issues, ”says Lyubov.
The UMMC materials directory has existed for a long time, as long as the company has been using information systems. Its maintenance began more than 20 years ago with a simple entry of the names of the required materials using an approach to registering records "as written on the invoice." Such a guide is a simple list, not a tool for structuring and analyzing information. A logical evolutionary stage in the development of this important component of the corporate information system of UMMC was the ordering of names, units of measurements and the approach to describing the directory entries. The work itself takes much less time than the process of implementing its results. In any system, the process of perceiving information takes more time than directly preparing and sending an information message. Any assimilated information immediately begins to become outdated, giving way to new and previously unknown.
During the work of the UMMC organization, about 400 thousand records of materials have been used, which should be clearly and clearly described. This job is very similar to the job of creating a dictionary. A kind of "dictionary" is just a reference book of materials. To get an idea of how this work is done, we recommend watching the film "A Beautiful Mind" (originally titled "The Professor ad The Madma"), in which Mel Gibson played the role of creator of the Oxford English Dictionary. Suffice it to say that the work on the creation of this dictionary was conceived in 1857, and the full edition of the dictionary was first completed in 1928.
“Performing work on the classification of hundreds of thousands of materials in a huge number of groups, we figured out many practical aspects of the work of UMMC enterprises and helped to streamline a large amount of information. Thus, work in the field of information technology helped UMMC enterprises in solving their current production tasks and problems of material and technical support, "notes another active participant in the project Natalia Gorokhova, who works as a leading software engineer in the SAP-systems development department of UMMC.
As the tasks of combining the data of the UMMC organizations, the development of logistics, procurement and sales functions, the collection of management reports and the analysis of the efficiency of the corporate information system of the UMMC, three tasks have become extremely important:
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Reducing the complexity of creating new entries in the material directory
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Providing a description of the directory entries so that they cannot be duplicated
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Providing quick search and comparison of different, at first glance, records of materials
These tasks were solved by implementing a new approach to the material classification system, in which there is an adaptive the rules for the automatic generation of materials names, the classification system for the management grouping and the rules for classifying materials according to their physical characteristics, selected for each class.
The updated classification system has been consistently implemented over the past 10 months within the framework of the project on normalization of the directory m
