Remediating item masters, bills of materials, or other critical data can enable important operating improvements

The quality of our ERP systems' master data can often either enable or disable us from taking full advantage of our investments in enterprise automation.  For manufacturers and distributors, ERP data such as items and bills of materials, as well as an array of other critical master data, must be properly set up and maintained.

The telltale signs of poor quality ERP data are familiar to many of us, which can include:

• Abnormally high level of manual workarounds
• Unreliable (or non-existent) purchasing signals
• Fluctuating production schedules
• Long fulfillment lead times
• Poor on-time performance
• Poor product or service quality
• Inventory shortages
• Inventory overstock
• Lack of clarity on operating costs

In some cases, not only is the master data needed to support business objectives faulty but so also are the business processes that are predicated on these data.  Affected business processes affect various stages of the customer order fulfillment pipeline and can include:

• Customer order management
• Production planning
• Production scheduling
• Purchasing
• Warehouse management
• Manufacturing
• Quality Assurance
• Accounting and finance

Low-quality ERP master data can be insidious in that it can lead to a culture in which the system is not believed and is therefore not followed.  The more that the system is not followed, the more that transaction discipline falls short thus perpetuating the unreliability of the company's IT assets.

Breaking the Vicious Cycle of Bad Data

An essential requirement for breaking out of this vicious cycle is to assess the quality of ERP master data and clean it up as needed to enable efficient and effective business processes.  This data cleansing is often referred to as data remediation.  For large datasets, it often involves applying the changes directly at the database level.

A primary tenet of ERP data cleansing is to tailor the master data so that it most appropriately and accurately aligns with the physical reality of the business and its operation.  ERP data remediation therefore requires a combination of technical IT and practical operating expertise.

The results of such an effort are often experienced very quickly in a very palpable way.  Not only are the various business practices transformed, but so too is the quality and benefit of management data.  This often has a significant effect on overall business performance since all the facets of the business are more effectively aligned.

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Visit our ERP Optimization page for more information.