Maintaining data quality. It doesn't need to be painful!

[Randy Littleson]

Data cleansing, like maintaining your car, fixing the roof, and painting the porch needs to be done if you expect your systems to function properly. Why is data cleansing important for ERP systems?

• System bloat: Old data such as obsolete parts, long lost customers, orders that have been open and untouched since 1972 take up space on your system, clutter up reports and slow down processing.
• Incorrect planning: We understand the concept of garbage-in, garbage-out. If you have incorrect data driving your planning system, what kind of a plan are you getting? Incorrect data manifests itself in two painful ways; excess inventory and late customer orders.
• System problems: Bad data can bring an ERP system to its knees. In my IT days, we had a planner accidentally set the Max quantity to 1 on a item (paint) that had demands in the millions of milliliters. As a result, our MRP process ran hours longer than it should have and ended up crashing because it ran out of order numbers!

Even with the best tools, data cleansing is a difficult, tedious task. Those of us who have had to do it, know we don’t want to go through that process again if we can avoid it. So the question becomes how do we prevent our systems from sliding into disarray again. Let’s take the discussion out of IT for a second. My home workshop had a well earned reputation for being a legendary mess. When I set off to do a job, I used to need to set aside an hour or two just to find the tools I needed. Sometimes I couldn’t find the tool I needed and ended up using the wrong tool with less than stellar results. Every once in a while, I’d clean up and for a few days, my workshop was organized bliss. After a few weeks, however, old habits (and my son) snuck in and before I know it, pandemonium ruled. Finally, borrowing from lean six sigma training I received in my manufacturing days, I set up a shadow board where the outline of my tools let me know where each tool was supposed to be. When I finished a job and that spot was empty, I knew I had forgotten to but something back. The result? My tools have stayed organized. I can start working on my projects immediately and don’t need to spend the first hour tracking down missing tools.


Ongoing data cleaning is not about setting up shadow boards in our data. It’s about putting tools and processes in place to ensure that data quality is maintained over time so we don’t need to go off on these massive data cleansing exercises. So what capabilities do you need to maintain the quality of your ERP data?

• Visibility: You can’t correct what you can’t see. Sometimes data quality issues exist in other locations in the supply chain. For example, how sure can we be that our Contract Manufacturer’s BOM is the same as we provided? We need tools that provide visibility to the key areas of our supply chain.
• Powerful, configurable, reporting technology: Every business has special rules that control what is correct and what is incorrect within their data. Any tool used for data cleansing must allow you to modify the reports to reflect your business rules.
• Alerting: The most important thing you can do to maintain data quality is to clean up data issues as they occur. Experience has shown, that it’s much more effective to have tools monitoring the data that let us know a problem has occurred than to proactively check a series of reports looking for data problems.
• Simulation: Sometimes we will identify a problem in our data, especially the rules that drive planning, where it’s not clear what the setting actually should be. With simulation capabilities, we can try different settings to see the effect they have on everything from detailed planning to key corporate metrics.

When is the last time you looked at the quality of your data? Have you gone through a data cleansing exercise? Do you have tools and policies in place to ensure your data quality is maintained? Post a comment and let us know!


John Westerveld is a Product Manager for Kinaxis, provider of the on-demand RapidResponse service that empowers multi-enterprise manufacturers with the collaborative and integrated demand-supply planning, monitoring, and response capabilities.