How long does it take to create material master data from PO lines?

Question

Hi ,
I was wondering if I could use an expert's opinion on the time and effort (FTEs) that goes into cleaning 50,000 PO lines that contain item descriptions to create a clean item master and a (basic) catalog.
The idea is:
To remove duplicates, invalid, non recurring/ redudant items
To create categories and sub categories (Standard - no coding)
Is there any defined tool and process-steps, not only for SAP but in general? Do consultants do this manually (with Excel spreadsheets) or some other means.
Any references will be very useful.
Thanks and regards.

Answer 1

could be any time from a day to some months, just depends how big the mess is and how detailed the wishlist is and how well you want become.
Most consultants will do this probably with Excel as they are used to it.
Mixed tools can speed the process up if the people are used to those tools, or slow it down if they are not and need training before they can start.
Is it really only the description which will finally be different for some thousand materials that finally need to be created?
I would start with TAANA transaction, this would give me already an aggregated view on the items, as it can be used to group and count the items by description (and other parameters such as year) so it is  down in seconds  to the number of variations. Means the duplicates are eliminated.
Then you identify the one-time buys from previous years and remove them from the list (the output of TAANA can be worked on with Excel inplace)
Now starts the hard work to remove the garbage. This is usually a manual work, looking for typos which made this different from the same item with the correct description. And even identifying duplicates that are totally different written "Elbow - stainless steel" and "Stainless steel elbow" and far apart from each other in your list.
For this I use Excel with the Fuzzy Lookup Add-in
Watch some videos on youtube to see how it works, it's great.
And finally you load the materials with LSMW. If you are experienced with SAP material masters then you know which fields this materials need, they all could be defined as constants and your input file could only have the description, if that is really the only difference, which I actually don't believe. There might be differences in material group, in the unit of measure and usually in the purchasing group too (probably even more fields). And exact those differences in the other fields have to be considered in the cleanup too.
So, just technically eliminating duplicates and the worst garbage and all the one-time buys and finally load uniformed NLAG materials with just different descriptions could be done in a day. But the experience tells me that this can quickly evolve to a bigger long term project with harmonizing the way how the description will be written, harmonizing units and material groups.