Many years ago, I was engaged in a project with a charter division of a major airline company. They suffered from poor quality operational data. It was almost impossible for them to report on route profitability. They were unable to plan for expansion and couldn’t even report on in-flight sales. Their M.D. confessed to me, 'I’m feeling embarrassed at group level board meetings because I know we have insufficient and inaccurate data'.
A major pension provider and wealth management company, I also worked with, had collected all its investor personal details from third parties and agents outside of their direct control. File transfers and manual re-keying had evidently resulted in too many inaccurately addressed letters. An incorrect address line or a misspelt surname erodes confidence.
In Retail there are numerous examples of supply chain and logistical failures resulting from inaccurate inventory data. Challenges increase if the enterprise has chosen to migrate its ERP systems to new platforms. Legacy data can be transferred with duplicates, missing attributes and broken relationships. This can cause £m’s in losses from planning failures and stock outs.
Data quality has always mattered. We all need satisfied customers and reduced risk by getting things right. However, by 2018, because of increased regulation, for example it became a legal obligation for companies who store and manage personal data in EU and UK. Getting things wrong can lead to:
- Incorrect decisions (misplaced investment)
- Harm to individuals (personal data wrongly shared)
- Damage to brand reputation (loss of market share)
Under General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it can also result in regulatory fines up to 20m Euro or 4% turnover. Data quality isn’t optional. Thankfully, this is generally understood.
What It isn’t commonly known, however, is where to begin if there are doubts surrounding complex legacy ERP & CRM systems which now drive the majority of operations. What’s more, these systems have commonly relied on expensive, hard to source, specialist expertise to provide maintenance.
Big companies have often implemented different applications over many years. Some accumulate through acquisition. It’s not uncommon for an enterprise to run with SAP, Oracle, MS Dynamics and Salesforce systems in parallel. Even with validation rules, these systems often prioritize process completion over data perfection. Bad data unfortunately doesn’t stay in silos. It spreads easily.
Safyr tackles one of the hardest root causes of poor data quality in ERP environments. Their hidden data models are where most problems begin and unfortunately If you don’t understand the data model you can’t begin to fix data quality issues.
Silwood Technology can help make ERP’s more visible, understandable and useable. They are challenging because:
- They can have 100k+ tables
- Table/field names are often technical and unclear
- Business meaning and relationships are hidden or missing
- Heavy customization makes every implementation unique
Safyr is a metadata discovery and intelligence platform for ERP & CRM applications. It harvests / extracts tables, fields, relationships, business names, descriptions and customisations to enable visibility of the source system landscape. Safyr isn’t a cleansing, validation or remediation engine. Our partners can help with those areas!
Safyr turns the “black box” provided by the big software vendors into outputs that can be used by analysts, not just the experts. It can help to find where the “bad data” might live. e.g. tables that contain customer or personal data. Insights get used across the business and results can also be shared with leading catalog governance, lineage and data quality tools.
For GDPR Safyr can also be provided with pre-configured GDPR (and CCPA) “Subject Areas” and allows you to build your own. A subject area is a curated group of tables and fields that relate to a specific business concept (e.g. customer, product or personal data). These can be used to compare with your own implementations, added to and kept up to date giving you a head start in identifying where and how personal data is stored.
At Silwood we believe that too much effort is often made on trying to fix data quality issues only when problems arise. Not enough focus is given to proactive discovery and analysis. Because ERP / CRM systems now represent the heartbeat of most companies, and they continue to be inadequately documented, we help you laser in on the discovery and understanding work in data quality that ultimately enables you to stay ahead of your competitors.
Useful Links:
Safyr’s Starter Packs for GDPR / Data Quality: Starter Packs
Safyr Helps To Improve Trust In Data: About Safyr | Silwood Technology
Safyr Evaluation Request Form: Safyr Evaluation