Enterprise Performance Management - Data is First Priority

 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...

These days every discussions in analytic and business intelligence areas eventually end up with "speed of analysis". Since SAP introduced HANA - the buzzword is about speed, real time, near real time dashboards. Everybody wants to talk about a cloud application - so they can get up & running with applications tomorrow, and if its deployed on HANA - more than happy since they get it faster. So CIO can start getting his dashboard from next week, every time he looks at it - its just near real time. Isn't it faster ROI ? Gone are the days when it used to take few months to get systems up and running, 3 hours everyday to get those BI reports and tune those dashboards where "Go Live" was a big event. The only question remains - When CIO looks at that new dashboard created in 3 minutes rather than 3 hours - how much time does it take to tell you that your data in the system is bad.  No surprise here. Last week I was talking to a procurement executive from a rep...

SO yes now you know that you need to have data in correct shape - but how to start all the juggernaut? I will tell you - this is a step by step process. So you need to identify your needs first. How to do that ? Profile your data using simple queries on database server like MS SQL server, Oracle etc. There are sophisticated tools available in the market who can profile data for you. What does this profiling meant to you - it analyze your data and will tell you how much dirty or incosnistent data you have. You may have some null values, date format issues, numeric and character data collision issues, binary data like male, female etc. Now once you know dirtiness of your data atleast you know where you stand. Now the next step is to analyze results and estimate the cleansing efforts. I will tell you that soon. Watch Out.