13 Aug Power up Your ERP with High-Quality Data
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions are necessary for organizations across all sizes and industry verticals to help the decision-makers take a comprehensive look at all the aspects of the business, identify the key profitable improvements, and make more informed decisions.
But an ERP implementation is not as simple as it sounds. A report by Panorama Consulting shows a failure rate of 21% in ERP implementations, a few years back. While there are many reasons behind ERP failures, one of the reasons is the poor quality of data. Let’s understand it in more detail.
ERP – After COVID-19
As the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, almost all operations went remote with employees working from home. At such times, organizations had to leverage the power of ERP system software to automate their key processes, manage complex systems, get real-time updates on the operations, and save additional expenses with consolidated IT processes.
According to ABI Research, it is estimated that manufacturers will spend about $14 billion on ERP by 2024. Even Gartner predicts that 65% of CIOs will integrate artificial intelligence into their ERP systems by 2022. All these trends only indicate the unstoppable growth of ERP in a post-COVID world.
Key Benefits of ERP
Since all the major organizations across the world are adopting ERP, and even medium and small-scale businesses are following suit, it is important to understand the key benefits of ERP.
- Enhanced collaboration and communication between all departments leading to overall performance improvement.
- Easy availability of accurate, convenient, and timely information leading to improved decision-making.
- Comprehensive reporting across all functions – from inventory to financial – leading to timely updates to all stakeholders.
- Reduced paperwork and optimized operations leading to significant cost-savings.
- Improved customer service leading to customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Why ERP needs clean data
However, to realize all the benefits of the ERP, it is critical that all the ERP data is clean, accurate, and up-to-date. But that is not always the case. Most of the ERP implementations do not consider data cleaning and best practices for master data management as a part of their strategy.
When an ERP is being implemented, there is a substantial amount of data being fed into the system. This is done to enhance the effectiveness of operations and eliminate the data which no longer has any positive benefit to the organization. However, it is very important to ensure that the data being entered into the system has been thoroughly cleaned, checked, and is accurate.
Any data that is redundant for ERP implementation and has quality issues can be called dirty data. Dirty data is mostly incomplete, inaccurate, and lacks great uniformity which can have a direct or indirect impact on the integrity of the data structure as a whole. Any issue that can ultimately give incorrect information to the decision-makers, can be called bad or dirty data. If any organizational change is implemented based on corrupted data, then it can have serious and long-term repercussions for the enterprise.
This is why clean data is imperative for ERP implementation at every stage, ensuring that the data to be entered is updated and accurate.
What kind of data needs cleansing?
Now one thing is clear – all irrelevant data and redundancies need to be avoided for ensuring the success of the ERP. So, should you delete all the inventory records that you have not used in years? Or everything older than 3 years should just be removed from the system? How about removing a vendor from whom you have not purchased anything for the last three years? Well, it is not as easy as this.
It can be a tough job to start data cleansing as there are no hard and fast rules to follow. Several departments need to come together and discuss together before deciding what stays and what goes.
Here is a list of questions you can ask to understand if your data needs cleaning:
- Do you have duplicate supplier or customer accounts?
- Do you have blank description fields for some of your products?
- Have you entered any data to get a price quote and then forgot to delete it?
- Is there anything critical on Excel that you do not have on your legacy system?
- Are there any product codes in your library that you no longer use?
If you have answered yes to even one of the above questions, then you certainly have data that requires cleaning before you go live with your latest ERP software.
What is involved in ERP data cleansing?
When integrated with ERP, good data assists in the better functioning of the organization. It also ensures the efficient working of all business tools in the ERP systems. Remember, an ERP system is only as good as the data maintained in the system.
To ensure data quality with data cleansing, here are some key processes to follow:
- Data Assessment: The first step is to analyze all the available data and sort them into categories so that it is easier to clean. Data harmonization or the standardization of data is also vital to incorporate information from different sources into a unified format for quicker assessment.
- Data Cleansing: Data cleansing is the process of extracting/collecting data from the legacy system and manipulating it to remove the incorrect or irrelevant data before it is loaded into the system. For example, there is no need to import the obsolete products’ data into the new ERP system from the legacy.
- Elimination of outdated information, archiving the old information: It is key to data cleansing to eliminate all the outdated information. But data archival or retention of this outdated data is also very crucial. Access to historical data is important for creating reports, generating comparison charts, and performance analysis. Remember, even the archival data needs cleansing.
- Data Governance: Once you are through with data cleansing and migrating, the greatest challenge lies in ensuring that this quality of data is maintained and governed regularly. For data governance, people, processes, and technology come together to manage the crucial data of an organization.
How can Griha Soft help?
The whole process of data cleansing and management may sound very complex and time-consuming, but one cannot deny its importance in the long-term success of your organization.
Griha Soft is here to help. To skip all the hassles of data management, and yet benefit from high-quality data for your ERP, the best solution is to partner with a professional data quality software company. And what can be better than Griha Soft? By ensuring thorough data assessment, deep cleaning, and proper archival of historical data, you can rely upon us for successful data management before integrating it with ERP.
