Enterprise Performance Management - Data is First Priority

We discussed taxonomies last time. Depending on your goal - whether its sourcing optimization or master data management or just spend analysis you can decide on what taxonomy you want to use - either global one like UNSPSC or your own or something available through service provider. Based on that taxonomy your service provide can run the engine and give you data classified. The delivery mechanism comes next. You need a dashboard kind of solution to slice and dice your data so your analysis give you information. So you got it. You can identify negotiable vendor set and go for savings. Thats one way of looking at it. If your goal is sourcing optimization and master data management then you need something additional - data attribute enrichment. What does that mean? You have material master with you at different plans, site and systems. Do you know whether its in good shape? Does it contain only 1 record for each material or there are many? Your system might be capable of doing search of s...

In last 10 days, after I wrote an article on spend analysis, supplier normalization and classification using taxonomies, I got number of responses on how to create a taxonomy, how to use it, what it should contain etc. I am responding everybody one on one, but thought I will also write some generalistic thoughts that will help somebody to get good idea to start with... So here it is - What is taxonomy? If you look at the dictionary, it says taxonomy means"the science or technique of classification". Wikipedia gives much broader information about it - "Taxonomies, or taxonomic schemes, are composed of taxonomic units known as taxa (singular taxon), or kinds of things that are arranged frequently in a hierarchical structure. Typically they are related by subtype-supertype relationships, also called parent-child relationships. In such a subtype-supertype relationship the subtype kind of thing has by definition the same constraints as the supertype kind of thing plus one or ...

Hello Everybody. I was missing the action on this blog since around 4 months now. Actually I was too busy with new data management engagement in my new role. As its a vacation season, its time to gather thoughts and share it..... Hope I will continue... As the title of this blog says "its a time to look at your data, spend data". YES, as everybody is hard pressed for cash in the difficult time like this - where to look for it? I have one answer - Look at your own transactions to see if you can save some there. Lets check what are you spending on, categorise your spend well.Check if you know where you can negotiate with your vendors and go for it. You will amaze to see how you have ignored this point in the past and how much you can save by doing this. My experience tells me that you can get benefit of atleast 5 to 7 % of savings by doing this activity. Wondering how - Keep reading .... Lets make it simple. You have repository of suppliers, and lots of transactions for those s...

Microsoft is going high on the BI side. Last month it was zoomix - more of a MDM side and today its datallegro. I guess they are trying to sneak more into the enterprise space by doing this. Lets see what happens more. Follow link to find out what it means to you - http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2008/07/what_the_micros.html http://www.zoomix.com http://www.datallegro.com/

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 custome...

So you got the large / medium enterprise legacy systems or may be a ERP system in your organization and decided to profile the data you have. The first step is to decide what all data you are going to work with. Normally spend analysis has to be done on your procurement, material data. So material master, vendor master, MRV, PO, part master are the ideal candidate to start. While extracting the data you need to very careful as if you miss some critical fields or required fields for analysis - which you will come to know at very later stage and then everything starts from the scratch. E in the ETL process is a large subject in itself to talk. So we will not get into that right now. Here I will assume that, you are there. You identified the fields correctly and then went ahead with the generating those text files - with proper delimiters. :-). And you are ready for running profiling. Here we have two options. A semi automatic database driven approach and fully automatic tool dependant ap...

You have got an enterprise system for your organization since long time. Do you know how much data quality issues you may have in your data? What does that mean ? 1. You may have different date formats - like mmddyyyy, ddmmyyyy, dd-mon-yyyy and so on. 2.You may have unit of measurement (UOM) inconsistencies issues. - Somebody putting the data in inches, one in cms and one in feet. 3. Have you considered the currency conversion and exchange rate issues. 4. And how about the material code ? One coding it as ABC123, other as ABC-123 and another as ABC 123. All are same, but when you search you dont find the material ABC123 and you order another 1000 quanitities, when same material named as ABC 123 is there in your warehouse. 5. Do you know the vendor ABC, AB-C, AB Corp and AB Ltd are same under one group? All these issues are eating in your money. Directly or indirectly. Just under your nose, because they are the issues, you are going through everyday, but just ignoring it due to invisibi...