Skip to main content
Guys, I am back. I was out for a while, travelling to east coast of US. So where were we? We talked about data profiling, its need and the approach towards it.


Last few days I have gone through a very good, detailed process of supplier normalization, classification, enrichment using a global compendium. I worked with the people in industry who are doing this business since last 25 years and associated with big names in finance, banking, entertainment and packaging.


So once you do the data profiling, you come to know the richness (or dirtness) of the data. Based on which you can estimate your efforts. But what if customer already has a good structure of the data (not good data though)? Initial work is easy. Talk to customer about the data format, input columns, totalling, what all things customer wants to see. Once requirements are frozen, you can go to next step setting up an environment in your system for the customer.


Test the whole setup using the sample data format from the customer. The input format mapping looks like this one -



So now you have inputs and you are also done with the input mapping analysis of the file you received. Whats next ? Next thing is to preprocess the data. Means whatever are the obvious flaws - knows issues - with teh data correct those. These are normally knows issues communicated by customer. Or may be something that you found and wanted to tell customer about it. Once you are on the same page, get ready to go ahead with first step processing of data transformation.
Will talk about it later. Transformation can be done in two ways - using a tool like informatica (www.informatica.com ), you can map source to target data, setup cleansing rules and get the processed cleansed data before going ahead with normalization. If you are not yet ready with the automation thing, just go ahead on writing your own rules. You need to be really good on writing SQL queries and procedures to do this. Also, this works when you know the rules with priorities and details.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Master Data Management – Product or Process ?

I have 2 SAP systems and I want to fix my material master, Services Master. I want all that data to be clean, standardized, classified, enriched and load it back to my SAP in next 6 months. What do you suggest ? Chris - one of my key client was explaining during a “solution understanding” call. My sales manager Tom, enthusiastically started talking about new version of the MDM platform by ERP company, tools, technologies, product landscape, licenses etc. After 30 minutes of sales pitch, I could see confusion on Chris’s face clearly. He said - but I don’t want to add any new product in my infrastructure for all this. Can you just implement MDM for me without I adding any new software ?   Both are using MDM implementation as a keyword, but in a completely different context. Chris wants to implement MDM as a process while Tom was trying to sell MDM as a new software. Whats the difference ? Lot I will say. MDM as a product – when you sell a   software license to a...

Data Management - Terminologies & Definitions

As a third step in my Data Management article series – lets look at commonly used terminology in the domain. Now these are very standard definitions I am quoting from a standard available glossary. The next step – next article would be to explain the relevance and usage of these terminology in business world. E.g. How to look at data standardization in supplier data context or material data context – when it comes to optimizing your procurement processes. That’s next. In my first article in this data management series –I compared data management with the story of elephant and seven blind men. http://manageyourdata.blogspot.in/2012/09/data-management-elephant-seven-blind-men.html The second post is more about – why its important to speak same language when you are running any data management initiative.   http://manageyourdata.blogspot.in/2012/09/data-management-are-we-all-speaking.html Data analysis : Analysis of data is a process of inspecting, cleaning, transfo...

Journey of procurement transformation begins with..….. Part II

 Original Blog post - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/journey-procurement-transformation-begins-part-ii-prashant-mendki Procurement transformation journey is complex, cross functional, time consuming and even frustrating at times. The very basic but a strategic step to start this journey is “Spend Analysis”. Again – this has to be done in a right way to get the potential benefits. We talked about that in first part of this article https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/journey-procurement-transformation-begins-part-i-prashant-mendki By definition – Spend Analysis is an analysis of your spend (invoice paid), what items you are spending on (product), who you are paying to (supplier). It looks really simple – no? When I worked with one of the large Media Entertainment company few years back, they had thousands of suppliers, millions of transactions, good amount of Maverick spend. It’s a global business with more than $2Bn in Spend, 12 different global systems. Thousands of trans...