SAP MRO


What Is MRO

MRO (Maintenance, repair and operations) supplies are items used in the production process but are not part of the final product produced. MRO supplies range from office supplies to safety equipment to spare parts for production equipment.

Why Is MRO Critical to Companies?

On the surface, MRO supplies may seem inconsequential to the daily operations of a manufacturer. But nothing could be further from the truth. Consider a production line that suddenly stops working because of a broken belt. Without this part available in inventory, an entire line of production comes to a halt, resulting in costly downtime until the equipment is repaired.

Procurement is most often responsible for maintaining the inventory of MRO supplies. With a diverse range of products, it’s imperative to keep the proper stock on hand. MRO is supported by SAP and third parties by establishing a tighter integration between planning and operations. This ultimately leads to greater asset utilization and prevents excess inventory. Integration of MRO with normal business processes also improves data accuracy for customers across the enterprise. 

What Is MRO

MRO (Maintenance, repair and operations) supplies are items used in the production process but are not part of the final product produced. MRO supplies range from office supplies to safety equipment to spare parts for production equipment.

Why Is MRO Critical to Companies?

On the surface, MRO supplies may seem inconsequential to the daily operations of a manufacturer. But nothing could be further from the truth. Consider a production line that suddenly stops working because of a broken belt. Without this part available in inventory, an entire line of production comes to a halt, resulting in costly downtime until the equipment is repaired.

Procurement is most often responsible for maintaining the inventory of MRO supplies. With a diverse range of products, it’s imperative to keep the proper stock on hand. MRO is supported by SAP and third parties by establishing a tighter integration between planning and operations. This ultimately leads to greater asset utilization and prevents excess inventory. Integration of MRO with normal business processes also improves data accuracy for customers across the enterprise. 

Key Considerations for SAPinsiders

  • Keys to Building an Intelligent MRO Organization. In this article, learn how companies in the aerospace and defense (A&D) industry can leverage artificial intelligence, machine learning, Internet of Things, and other intelligent technologies for a more intelligent MRO enterprise. Frank Klipphahn, Industry Solution Manager at SAP, says a focus on experience management (XM) is key to an intelligent MRO organization. By gaining a better understanding of the customer and feedback on product maintenance, that data can be used for a more efficient and intelligent MRO process. “The idea is that you can use both experience and operational data to guide business decisions and allow you to collect insights from customers, employees, and the product itself because we are dealing with smart IoT-enabled products.”
  • Data Integrity and Transformation Go Hand in Hand.

Read how data integrity around spare parts and heavy assets in manufacturing is the foundation for transformation. Prospecta CEO and co-founder Ranjan Bakshi says today, most companies are still managing their MRO spare parts without any standard procedure and lack data quality in the absence of a proper governance framework. This is a big hindrance in inventory optimization and management of spare parts. Leveraging a data quality enhancement tool has helped organizations improve their inventory optimization initiatives significantly, resulting in cost and process efficiency.

Other vendors in the transportation management space include: Consultare America and Wurth USA.

23 results

  1. aerospace airline airplane aviation

    Keys to Building an Intelligent MRO Organization

    Published: 10/April/2020

    Reading time: 13 mins

    In aviation industries, such as aerospace and defense (A&D), maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) organizations operate a very complicated framework to maintain their aerospace assets. In the SAP ecosystem, these assets involve many different business segments, and maintenance activities need to be planned for, executed, and documented — and in a timely manner — to…

  2. Deep Dive: The MRP Playbook for MRO: Getting the Right People, Parts and Tools at the Right Place and Time

    Click HERE to view the presentation deck slides. Wading through the work order, reservation and requisition lists needed to plan and schedule work at any organization is absolutely intimidating. On the surface, it seems nearly impossible to quickly identify and prioritize what tasks and exceptions need to be addressed first. Couple this with today’s Supply…...…

  3. 20%+ Reduction in your MRO Inventory with No Risk Increases!

    Click HERE to view the presentation deck slides. If cash (working capital) management is a focus or an area of concern in your business, come along and I’ll show you how to open the bonnet, tune the engine, and get moving! With this analogy, if you do not regularly calculate your MIN/MAX settings it’s like…...…

  4. Use Case: Real-time reporting thanks to a new SAP HANA database in the MRO sector

    Published: 21/December/2020

    Reading time: 1 min

    In order to increase reaction and implementation speeds in international overhaul business and in material logistics, Lufthansa Technik has migrated its BI system to SAP HANA. The project:

  5. Becoming a Digital Enterprise Starts with Cloud

    Published: 26/April/2016

    Reading time: 11 mins

    Today’s enterprises have to contend with an uncomfortable truth: Legacy systems simply aren’t responsive enough to handle the explosive data growth or the rapid customization economy. In order to avoid being left behind, enterprises need to make the move to a more robust IT environment powered by a digital core. And for many, the most…

  6. Ascend

    Ascend Performance Materials Achieves 99.9% Data Accuracy and Massive Time Savings with Supply Chain Automation

    Published: 05/November/2020

    Reading time: 12 mins

    Manufacturing organizations today are under increasing pressure to move faster, reduce errors and risk, and be more efficient. For a company such as Ascend Performance Materials — which produces chemicals, fibers, and plastics for the automotive, electronics, textile, and consumer industries — reducing risk is paramount. The business impact of having bad data could be…

  7. Aggregate Inventory Management in SAP, Part II of II

    Published: 01/April/2020

    Reading time: 14 mins

    by Venkata Ramana Nethi CSCP, CPIM.; Business Process Lead – Operations, Schlumberger Organizational inventory policy drives the threshold values and guidelines on how individual material should be managed in manufacturing or procurement processes. Putting the right information in the hands of the right people at the right time can save millions of dollars for companies.…

  8. Right Parts, Right Resources, Right Place, Right Time – Delivering on the Dream with SAP Integrated Business Planning

    Click HERE to view the presentation deck slides. Discover how the SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) process for Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO) can calculate and optimize spare parts and workforce planning for both maintenance and projects. This session will compare traditional approaches, such as Material Requirements Planning (MRP) and demonstrate SAP IBP for MRO,…...…

  9. Live from SAPinsider Studio: Jan Jackman of IBM on Digital Reinvention

     Jan Jackman, Vice President, Cloud for Enterprise Applications, IBM, visited SAPinsider Studio at the 2016 IoT Conference to discuss the importance of digital reinvention in the cloud for SAP customers. Topics of this interview include how to devise a hybrid IT strategy, benefits of the SAP and IBM alliance, and how customers are embracing digitization…

  10. MSC Industrial Supply Co. Retools to Meet Complex Market Expectations

    Published: 23/July/2021

    Reading time: 5 mins

    Today MSC Industrial Supply Co. (MSC) is a successful dot com business built inside of an 80-year-old company that started as a wholesale catalog distributor. Digital moves continue to support MSC’s changing customer landscape and help the business align with new ways of thinking about software. MSC’s Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer Charlie…