It’s an open secret that a lion’s share of the effort in any supply or demand planning project is ensuring that we feed accurate data. Maintaining accurate master/transactional data and providing it to downstream systems (planning and/or execution) on a regular basis is a huge task, and to a large extent the success of the project depends upon accurate data being available.
Several factors effect the availability of accurate data: a good governance model, robust user training, efficient business processes to maintain data and handle exceptions, quality data transformations from different source system/s, effective use of technology etc. It’s extremely important to set up these processes to achieve high degree of data accuracy.
Importance of Data Audits & Cleansing
Operationally, use of data audits and data cleansing on a routine basis is a key step in preparing and checking your data before using it. Identifying issues early on saves a great deal of time and money. This is specifically true in supply planning , where the impact of bad data is compounded as the process gets into analysis and execution details not to mention the disruption to business execution.
The architecture of Oracle VCP products lends very well to establishing such audits and cleansing prior to the use of the data in the downstream planning processes. The collected data can be checked for accuracy prior to being used in the planning process. Users also have an excellent chance to cleanse the data prior to its use. While a wide range of data can be checked, a more efficient way is to identify the data to be checked a priori and design a data audit process that is customized to each situation.
Inspirage Data Tools
Inspirage offers tools to audit and cleanse the data. Users can choose the type of data that needs to be tracked. This can range from specific item attributes to transactional data. User can select the criteria with which they want to audit the data. A wealth of information can be generated based on the business rules, filtration criteria, and category of items. Typically ‘suspect’ data can be reported and presented in easy-to-understand Excel files.
Users can also choose to correct the data in Excel and optionally update the system of record in EBS using standard Oracle APIs. Typical data that can be automatically updated in EBS include item attributes, BOM, routing etc.
While Inspirage offers a comprehensive set of data audit and cleansing capability, your specific situation might require custom logic to identify the data conditions. The framework developed by Inspirage can very easily be extended to incorporate custom logic to identify the data conditions. Users can use the Inspirage-developed framework to modify and update the data in multiple stages: during initial data cutovers, during implementation cycle, and as standard process on day-to-day basis.
