AI-Driven Standardization and Harmonization of Material Codes Across CPSEs
“Different public sector companies buy the same industrial parts and raw materials but call them by completely different names, codes, and descriptions. This causes massive inventory waste and prevents joint bulk buying. You need to build an AI platform that reads data from various company databases, matches identical or similar parts, and standardizes them into a single national material catalog.”
Deconstructed Problem Blueprint
WHAT TO BUILD?
A full-stack AI-powered B2B software platform (National Unified Material Master Framework) with a web dashboard, NLP entity-matching engine, and an approval workflow system.
WHO IS IT FOR?
Primary beneficiaries are Central Public Sector Enterprises (CPSEs) like CPCL, ONGC, and NTPC. Users include procurement managers, inventory controllers, and material master data administrators.
WHY DOES IT EXIST?
Historically, companies grew in silos with legacy SAP and ERP configurations. Without an enterprise data standard, each organization created independent material catalogs, resulting in duplicate inventory, higher procurement overheads, and missed cross-company volume discount opportunities.
INPUT → PROCESS → OUTPUT ARCHITECTURE PIPELINE
Material master exports (CSV, Excel, or JSON dumps from SAP/ERP systems containing material codes, unstructured text descriptions, technical parameters, unit of measurement, and historical pricing).
Data cleaning using regex, tokenization, embedding generation via sentence-transformers, fuzzy string matching, vector similarity search (using pgvector), and Large Language Model (LLM) based attribute extraction for technical parameters.
A Unified National Material Code mapping matrix, standardized descriptions, grouped clusters of duplicate or equivalent materials, confidence score indicators, and human-in-the-loop review dashboards.
CONSTRAINTS
- Handling heavily abbreviated, truncated, or noisy legacy text descriptions in industrial jargon.
- Maintaining legacy mapping traceability back to individual CPSE source codes without breaking external SAP dependencies.
- Ensuring deterministic and auditable compliance logs for every code merging or harmonization decision.
JURY METRICS
- Semantic matching accuracy (Precision & Recall in correctly identifying duplicate items)
- Reduction percentage in duplicate material entry counts
- End-to-end ingestion and processing latency per 10,000 records
- User interface responsiveness and review workflow efficiency
CORE BOTTLENECK
Unstructured, highly inconsistent abbreviations across legacy catalogs (e.g., 'MS HEX BOLT M12X50' vs 'BOLT HEX M 12 X 50 FE GR 8.8') where traditional string matching fails completely.
Why You Should Choose This PS (Pros)
- Extremely high national economic impact ('One Nation – One Material Code') aligning with current public sector digital transformation goals.
- Clear, modular software architecture that allows teams to showcase end-to-end workflows easily during short evaluation windows.
- Strong potential for real-world pilot deployment with participating CPSEs post-hackathon.
Challenges & Risks to Watch (Cons)
- Lack of standardized pre-existing open-source industrial material master datasets, requiring mock data generation for the demo.
- Requires fine-tuning text embeddings for domain-specific industrial terminology (metallurgy, piping, electrical components).
Recommended Tech Stack & Grand Finale Features
Killer Features to Impress the SIH Jury
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This results in duplication of material masters, inconsistent descriptions, difficulty in identifying equivalent materials, fragmented procurement data, higher inventory levels and limited opportunities for collaborative procurement.
A unified and intelligent approach is therefore required to standardize, harmonize and rationalize material master data across CPSEs.
The system shall use Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to identify identical, duplicate, near-duplicate and functionally equivalent materials across different ERP/SAP systems.
The platform should automatically recommend standardized material descriptions, specifications, classifications and a Common National Material Code, while retaining mapping with the respective CPSE's existing material codes.
The system should provide intelligent matching and recommendation capabilities, allowing users to review, validate and approve proposed mappings. It should also support migration/mapping of legacy material codes and seamless integration with existing SAP/ERP systems.
The proposed solution should enable 'One Nation – One Material Code' for common materials, while maintaining traceability to individual CPSE material codes.