The Math That Maintenance Managers Don't See
The duplicate part isn't the cost. It's the trigger.
One duplicate part number. How much could it really cost?
Let’s trace it.
The Visible Cost
A bearing gets entered into the system. It already exists under a different part number — but the person creating the record doesn’t know that. The system doesn’t stop them.
Cost of the duplicate entry: essentially zero. A few minutes of someone’s time.
This is the cost that shows up nowhere.
The First Ripple
Six months later, a pump fails. The maintenance tech searches for the bearing. Finds one option. Out of stock.
They don’t find the other three identical bearings — sitting in inventory under different names, different numbers, different classifications.
Emergency procurement: $1,400.
Overnight freight. Premium pricing. Paperwork.
The Second Ripple
The pump is down for 14 hours waiting for the part that was already on the shelf.
Downtime cost: $38,000.
Production targets missed. Overtime to catch up. Downstream schedule disruptions.
The Third Ripple
Across the organization, 47 identical bearings sit in 12 storerooms. Each entered separately. Each with safety stock. Each reordered independently.
Annual carrying cost: $112,000.
Multiply this by hundreds of duplicate clusters. Thousands, in a large operation.
The Math Nobody Sees
The spreadsheet shows inventory costs. It shows procurement spend. It shows maintenance budgets.
It doesn’t show the connection between them.
Nobody asks: why did we emergency-order a part we already had? Nobody connects the downtime to a data entry made two years ago by someone who’s no longer with the company.
The costs are real. The cause is invisible.
Why This Persists
It’s not that organizations don’t care about these costs. They do.
But the costs present in different departments. Procurement sees their numbers. Maintenance sees theirs. Finance sees aggregate budgets. The connective tissue — the dirty data underneath — belongs to no one.
MDM platforms promise to fix this. They generate reports. They flag violations. They create governance workflows.
But they operate after the fact. The duplicate already exists. The ripples are already spreading.
The Different Math
What if the duplicate never got created?
No emergency procurement. No downtime. No redundant inventory.
The cost of prevention: a few seconds of validation at the moment of entry.
The cost of remediation: everything we just described, compounding annually.
The math isn’t complicated. It’s just invisible until you make it visible.
Next in the series: "What 'Good Enough' Data Actually Looks Like" — why perfection isn't the goal, and what to aim for instead.
About the Author
Author Bio: Raghu Vishwanath is Managing Partner at Bluemind Solutions and serves as CTO at KeyZane, a financial inclusion platform live in Central and West Africa. Over 30+ years across software engineering and technical leadership, he has watched the terms of specialization change — and learned that the only sustainable expertise is the willingness to build it again.