Case Studies – STARLINK Middle East

Largest Data Cleansing Project in the Middle East For Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC)

Sub-contractor 1. : Pilog (Pty) Ltd.
Sub-contractor 2. : Hafincons
Sub-contractor 3. : Logteck (Pty) Ltd.

Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) was established in 1976 to add value to Saudi Arabia’s natural hydrocarbon resources. Today, SABIC is among the leading petrochemical companies in terms of sales and product diversity. Headquartered in Riyadh, they are also one of the Middle East’s largest non-oil industrial companies.
During their ERP implementation they realised that to run on a single, unified version of SAP they required a cleansing exercise to ensure consistency in the naming and description of the items throughout SABIC. They also discovered that a high percentage of the data naming and describing their items does not exist.
After a lengthy RFP process Starlink Middle East was selected as the partner of choice to cleanse and standardise SABIC massive material master with close to 700,000 item lines.
The project for SABIC had two phases, during phase1 concepts pilot, the initial 42,000 line items were addressed and signed off successfully. Phase 2 was subsequently kicked off the lead to the cleansing, photographing, cataloguing and categorisation of the remainder of the 566,000 line items.
The project varied from physical walk downs during which the Starlink teams of field managers, data validators and photographers verified, in a physical walk down exercise of SABIC’s warehouses, the data as received from SABIC, to electronic cleansing and verification exercises performed by Starlink and it’s partners across India and South Africa.
The project also entailed the implementation of a Content Managements solution which Starlink implemented, customised and integrated successfully into the SABIC business system architecture.
As a result, approx600,000 line items of SABIC were cataloged successfully.

Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) wanted to have an advanced cataloguing system with an international standard that complies with the company’s vision and future growth. The purpose of the company “Catalogue Data Improvement and Imaging Project (CDIIP)” was to establish an effective cataloguing management system that would manage the company inventory and to ease the company procurement operations. Back in the 80s, SEC started doing data cleansing and purchased “Struxure” from Intermat, US based company with the schema, SMD. SEC used this standard in describing their materials and data cleansed many items in the Eastern province. After the consolidation of the four electricity companies, this project was extended to West region. There in the West region, more cataloguing and items imaging was done. Their SMD was customized with the time and more additions were included. Their inventory master grew bigger and more challenges were faced and hence the requirement for a third party to do data cleansing for the new hundred of thousands items added to their material master. It was then decided to contract the project to a contractor who had similar experience in the Kingdom and had tools to automate the process.

Having evaluated many foreign and local vendors, SEC awarded Starlink the CDIIP project in January 2005 for the following scope:

The installation of the cataloguing software “Struxure” including Struxure.Net
Providing SEC with latest version of SMD, the internationally recognized standard, “Standard Modifier Dictionary
Cataloguing and Imaging of half a million Line items in their inventory master
The digital Imaging required two complete views of an item with .jpg and PowerPoint shows including the name plates of specific items.

The project has started and Starlink is cleansing data over 20,000 items per month. Project is successfully completed in 2010 with extension for two more phases started in 2008 to 2010.

During the time Saudi Aramco introduced the new cataloguing application software known as SAP MDM (Materials Data Management) to replace the old Macs cataloguing tool, Starlink Middle East had succeeded to become one of the pioneers who had attained proficiency with the latest SA cataloguing tool. Starlink Middle East had completed seminar and trainingrequirements provided by Saudi Aramco MSSD (Materials Services and Standardization Division).The technical know-howand familiarity with the new software which was fully integrated with SA SAP/R3 system had become one of the epitomein the technical information proficiency achieved by Starlink Middle East in the field of cataloguing services.

With the implementation of the new SA SAP MDMcataloguing tool, Starlink Middle East had been contractedby Saudi Aramco to carry out the equipment spare parts cataloguing and BOM-linkage services for the new and existing SA plants located on differentlocations within the kingdom.

The project, being classified into SPDP (Spare Parts Data Package) cataloging services and BOM-linkage services enabled Starlink Middle East to further enhanced the company’s successin the field of cataloguing technical expertise.

Initiating the work scope of Saudi Aramco SPDP cataloguing services agreement, Starlink Middle East had carried out effectively the contract project partaking various activities within the main tasksbeing grouped in Coordination, Review and Cataloguing environments.

Correspondingly, from the work scope of Saudi Aramco BOM-linkage services agreement, Starlink Middle East had successfully accomplished the contract project being carried out on various SA plant sites, partaking various activities within the main tasks being grouped in Equipment Data Collection (walkthrough), Equipment BOM Data Verification and SAP/R3 system Equipment BOM Updateand Equipment BOM Linkage (<New catalogued equipment>–without walkthrough).

For both sides, Starlink Middle East had invested fully on manpower resources and fielded effective and efficient team of cataloguing engineers of various disciplines (Mechanical, Electrical and Instrumentation) to accomplish productively the various tasks of the project required to perform, delivering high-impact performance indicators, crucial to the project performance and growth.