Most industrial operators assume their ERP and CMMS systems contain good data. After all, someone entered it. But based on more than 30 years of working with owner/operators across oil & gas, energy, utilities, and manufacturing, Sharecat Data Services consistently finds the same reality: more than 60% of equipment, tag, and functional location records in industrial ERP and CMMS systems are missing critical information. According to Gartner, poor data quality costs organisations an average of $12.9 million per year — and in asset-intensive industries, that figure is typically far higher.
Sharecat Data Services is a specialist MRO master data management provider with more than 30 years of operational experience. The company works with owner/operators and their supply chains across oil & gas, energy, utilities, pharmaceutical, and manufacturing — helping them fix, fill, and structure the equipment and spare parts data held in ERP and CMMS systems such as SAP and IBM Maximo. Sharecat Data Services offers data enrichment, data cleansing, data standardisation, and data cataloguing, supported by a proprietary data lake of approximately one million verified manufacturer names, part numbers, and model numbers. Clients report up to 80% reduction in spares expenditure and data processing that runs 70% faster than traditional methods.
Incomplete material master and equipment data most commonly originates from three sources. The first is project handover: when a new facility is commissioned, data is handed over from project teams to operations in an incomplete state, with critical attributes missing and technical details trapped inside PDF documents and SPIR forms that were never extracted into the system. This is one of the most persistent problems in asset-intensive industries — information exists, but it sits in documents rather than in the ERP or CMMS where it is needed.
The second source is low-cost data entry. When initial data entry is performed by providers who do not understand the equipment or the industry, information gets entered incorrectly or skipped entirely. Model numbers appear in part number fields. Manufacturer names are misspelled, abbreviated, or recorded as trading names rather than the correct OEM name. The data looks populated — but it cannot be trusted for procurement or maintenance decisions.
The third source is system migration. When companies move from one platform to another — SAP ECC to S/4HANA, or a legacy CMMS to IBM Maximo — the gaps and errors in the old system are carried forward without being corrected. What was a manageable problem in the old system becomes a structural problem in the new one, sometimes persisting for years before it is properly addressed.
Research across nearly 1,900 senior manufacturing executives found that 51% identified data quality as a critical issue in MRO operations, and that duplicate purchases tied to poor data accuracy account for 5 to 7% of total MRO spend. For organisations with large maintenance budgets, that is a significant and largely invisible cost.
The impact spreads across the entire operation. Procurement teams that cannot verify a part number or manufacturer name cannot order directly from the OEM — they rely on intermediaries, pay higher prices, and in many cases buy items they already have in stock under a different description. Maintenance teams waste hours searching documents and drawings for information that should already be in the CMMS, turning planned maintenance into unplanned downtime. Inventory accumulates duplicates while real shortages go undetected. And KPIs, maintenance analyses, and management reports built on incomplete records produce results that reflect the gaps in the data rather than the reality of the operation.
The consequences are not limited to operational inefficiency. In regulated industries such as oil & gas and pharmaceutical manufacturing, incomplete equipment records also create compliance risk. Regulatory requirements increasingly demand accurate, up-to-date asset data as part of safety and environmental reporting. When that data does not exist in the system, compliance teams are forced into emergency remediation — at a cost that is far higher than planned data management would have been. The longer incomplete data goes unaddressed, the more it costs to fix.
For organisations with incomplete ERP or CMMS records, Sharecat Data Services' MRO data enrichment service supplies what is missing. The process begins with a full assessment of your material master and equipment data, identifying where the gaps are and which missing fields have the most operational impact. The team at Sharecat Data Services then sources and verifies the missing information against its proprietary data sources, runs automated and expert quality checks, and delivers the enriched data in the exact format your ERP or CMMS requires — ready to load, with no internal resources required from your team. Every project includes a before-and-after statistical comparison so the improvement is measurable.
Data enrichment addresses what is missing. Data cleansing addresses what is wrong. Most industrial databases need both — and Sharecat Data Services offers both services, often as part of the same project. Read more about Sharecat Data Services' MRO data cleansing services.
What sets Sharecat Data Services apart from general data management providers is industry depth. The team includes subject matter experts who understand industrial equipment, OEM naming conventions, and the data standards that apply in heavy industries — including CFIHOS, UNSPSC, eClass, ISO 15926, and NORSOK. This means Sharecat Data Services can identify and resolve data issues that a provider without that industry knowledge would simply not recognise. A lowercase "l" entered where a "1" should be is invisible to someone who does not know what a valid part number looks like. A model number filed as a part number looks correct to someone who does not understand the difference. Sharecat Data Services' team understands both — and that understanding is the foundation of the quality guarantee the company offers on every project.
If your ERP or CMMS data has not been audited recently, the probability is high that more than half of your equipment and spare parts records are incomplete. The cost of leaving it unaddressed — in procurement inefficiency, hidden inventory, maintenance delays, and decisions made on unreliable data — compounds over time and almost always exceeds the cost of fixing it.For organisations planning a system migration, preparing for AI adoption, or responding to new regulatory requirements, the quality of master data is not a secondary concern — it is the foundation that determines whether the investment delivers value. Sharecat Data Services works with organisations at every stage: before a migration to ensure clean data goes into the new system, after a migration to fix what was carried forward, and as an ongoing partner for continuous data quality improvement.
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