2025 at SPARROW: 2025: Shaping Industry 4.0 together with our customers

In 2025, we stayed close to the realities our customers face every day. What we built was shaped by practical conversations: a planner dealing with obsolete stock, a data team struggling with multilingual descriptions, a plant looking for ways to reuse parts instead of scrapping them.

Those conversations shaped not only our roadmap, but also how we work with customers. As one customer put it:

“What made SPARROW stand out was their willingness to build a true partnership. We see the impact in everyday operations. The new workflows are now part of daily routines.”

That sentence captures something important. In 2025, progress at SPARROW was not measured by launches alone, but by whether new capabilities actually changed how spare parts are handled day to day by maintenance, planning, IT and procurement teams.

This blog is not a list of announcements. It is a look back at how SPARROW evolved alongside our customers, and what concretely changed in spare parts operations as a result.

A Catalogue That Reflects Industrial Reality

In 2025, the SPARROW catalogue grew to 44 million spare parts, four times larger than last year.

This is not growth for growth’s sake. A catalogue of this scale matters because industrial spare parts are:

• fragmented across OEMs and suppliers
• inconsistently described
• highly multilingual in global organisations

To reflect this reality, we expanded our catalogue capabilities so that both catalogue data and user-entered material descriptions are now supported in 9 languages.

This removes a persistent barrier in multinational environments: language mismatches that prevent accurate matching, duplicate detection and reuse across plants and regions. This capability is critical for any organisation managing MRO globally and still rare in the market.

Product Innovations That Changed How Customers Work

MatchAssist: From Black Box to Confident Decision-Making

With MatchAssist, we fundamentally changed how users interact with AI-driven matching. MatchAssist introduces a transparent, assisted validation layer for AI matching suggestions. Users can quickly understand why a match is suggested, review it efficiently and confirm it with confidence.

The result is faster harmonisation, higher acceptance and less friction between data teams, maintenance and procurement.

ExcessNext: Closing the Loop on Spare Parts Decisions

One of the most important innovations of 2025 did not start in a roadmap workshop. It started with a customer request. What followed was telling: once introduced, the capability was quickly embraced by many of our other customers facing the same operational challenges.

ExcessNext, now part of SPARROW.Plan, allows users to decide what should happen after SPARROW has made a recommendation for a spare part.

For parts identified as obsolete, overstocked or no longer needed, users can:

• offer them on an internal marketplace via SPARROW.Pool
• add them to a list for resale 
• scrap them with traceability

This is more than a feature. It builds on a strategy SPARROW has followed from the beginning: optimising spare parts across their entire lifecycle.

By directly connecting SPARROW.Plan and SPARROW.Pool, Part Next Action turns insight into execution, something competitors still struggle to deliver.

Plant Management in SPARROW.Clean: Designed for How Plants Actually Work

In SPARROW.Clean, we introduced Plant Management, enabling companies to create parts at the company level and immediately extend it to the plant where they are stocked, all in a single great user workflow.

This aligns spare parts master data with real operational flows and saves a considerable amount of time, especially in SAP-centric environments. Combined with a richer user experience, it significantly improves collaboration between central data governance teams and local plant users. No other competitor offers such a deep SAP integration as we do.

Measurable Impact Across Customer Operations

Product innovation only matters if it delivers results. In 2025, SPARROW users collectively achieved:

• Over half a million spare parts cleaned
• Over 55,000 duplicates identified
• Over €57 million saving potentials across spare parts operations
• Fastest onboarding: 2 weeks from contract signature to active usage

These numbers reinforce a consistent pattern we see across projects: when spare parts data becomes reliable, decision-making accelerates and savings follow.

Building a Platform for Industry Exchange

Beyond the product, 2025 was also about how SPARROW engages with the MRO community.

We:

• launched a new SPARROW website, focused on clarity and use-case relevance
• introduced the MRO Bulletin, our monthly newsletter for practitioners
• doubled down on expert-led content, publishing interview-based blog series with MRO and spare parts practitioners such as Andrew Jordan and Conrad Greer. These conversations reinforced a belief we strongly hold: the most valuable insights rarely come from theory alone, they come from lived experience on the shop floor, in warehouses and in maintenance planning.

Looking ahead

What 2025 reinforced is a simple truth: spare parts data quality is not a one-off achievement, but an ongoing practice. And lasting savings do not come from cleaner data alone, but from repeatedly acting on what that data reveals.

Our focus going forward is to keep strengthening data-based actions, turning analysis into concrete decisions on what to stock, reuse, pool or retire, enabling global teams to work together on one master data. When those actions become part of daily routines, savings are no longer theoretical; they are operational and measurable.

That is where SPARROW continues to invest.

Ready to unlock measurable savings from your spare parts data?

• Book a SPARROW demo
• Ask for an assessment of the quality of your spare parts data with our Quick Scan
• Calculate your Cost Saving Potential and Payback period with our Interactive Calculator