One parts catalogue from five legacy systems
Sixty-one thousand part records lived in five systems with no shared identifier. They now feed quoting, purchasing and the shop floor from one catalogue.
The same bracket, five times, five prices
Vale Engineering grew by acquisition and inherited five parts databases. The same component appeared under different codes with different prices and stock levels. Quoting meant phoning the stores to find out what was actually on a shelf.
Match on attributes, not on names
Names were useless, so we matched on dimensions, material, supplier code and drawing references, with a fuzzy pass over descriptions. Confident matches merged automatically; the rest went to a review queue where a stores manager confirmed or split them, 40 to 60 a day for six weeks.
A canonical record with the history kept
Every merged part keeps its legacy codes as aliases, so old drawings, invoices and purchase orders still resolve. Nothing was deleted, which is what let the engineering team trust the migration.
Quotes from one screen
61,000 records collapsed to 38,400 canonical parts. Quoting time fell fourfold because price and availability now come from one place, and £210,000 of duplicate stock was identified in the first inventory count after go-live.
The merge kept every old code alive. That single decision is why the shop floor came with us.
VEOperations Manager, Vale Engineering