Find duplicates & consolidate inventory data - this is how it works

Duplicates in inventory data are a horror for any company. Duplicate development costs, duplicate master data management, duplicate inventory, duplicate procurement costs, duplicate costs everywhere you look. Duplicates in inventory also create confusion. This occurs more often than one would like. Manufacturing, assembly, and service are often confronted with these situations, which lead to errors and complicated processes. Why make things so difficult for yourself? Read the following blog to learn how you can efficiently avoid duplicates in the future and consolidate your inventory data.

In this way, you can find the duplicates in your inventory data and consolidate them sustainably.

If you question this unsatisfactory situation, you get the answer that you can't avoid it. It is just the way it is. The effort to find the duplicates is too great and there is no watertight procedure to avoid the creation of duplicates. Well - that is conditionally correct. If you consider conventional procedures, then it is a very tedious task to clean the database.

The answer to the question of whether duplicates can be eliminated simply, systematically, and effectively can be answered with an unequivocal YES.

This statement can be formulated so concretely for drawing parts.

Fortunately, keeping teams of several people busy with such a task over a period of months is a thing of the past. This is a waste of money and valuable resources. Because this effort is now manageable with modern technology and could be done in a few days. We can do it - elegantly.

With the help of modern shape indexing search technology, duplicates for drawing parts can be identified easily, reliably, and quickly.

This does not require any classification or other preparations and cleanups. With this method, the drawing parts are indexed via a special procedure, the shape indexing procedure. This index is suitable for comparing all drawing parts with each other in a very short time and for visualizing and marking twins as well as triplets, quads, etc. in the data stock. Eliminating or marking duplicates becomes child's play compared to the tedious manual checking of the data. Here you will be interested in the automatic matching of 3D data with the GATEKEEPER from SIMUFORM.

Many people ask: How long does something like this take exactly? The pure computing time for shape indexing and subsequent duplicate checking for 20,000 drawing parts, for example, takes about 4 to 5 hours, depending on the hardware. Doubling the number of drawing parts quadruples the time required. However, this need not bother a user in the end, because the process can run completely in the background. Compared to conventional processes, the increase in speed via this technology is a quantum leap.

Find duplicates & consolidate inventory data: The result?

The result from this duplicate evaluation can be further processed via a simple list export. In this way, the lists created for the identified duplicates or triplets can be imported into an ERP system in order to identify the duplicates and, at the same time, to refer to the associated reference parts or preferred parts. 

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