As Dull as Data?

Brave New World

Isn’t our new digital world fantastic?

Our ability to deal with the vast complexities of living in the modern world is seemingly accelerating in their abilities to make life easier, more convenient, more cost-effective and even more sustainable.

We have regular grand aspirations for transformation and the creation of new products, services and route to market. Digitalisation as a disruptor has now been with us for decades.

Data Foundations

A couple of decades ago I was in my formative years with the wonderful Heinz organisation, I had the pleasure of meeting a certain data manager and I still remember a conversation with him in respect of the importance of data hygiene and cleanliness. I had been under the misapprehension that all data within our ERPs would be accurate, consistent, clean, clear. I learned an extremely valuable lesson that day that has stood the test of time.

You see, you cannot do all of the “digital acrobatics” without having mastery of the core data these solutions need to have. From my experience, industries have mediocre performance here. Whether it be out of date and inaccurate product master data, customer master data, supplier master data or indeed employee master data – all are, on close examination found wanting. Interestingly we have seen trends of the larger and better resourced businesses being the poorest at this, certainly the fast growing new businesses seem worst of all.

But does all of this focus on the dullest of dull things that is data really matter? Well, during day to day operations inaccurate data will drive glitches and issues, it is unlikely to grind a business to a halt. To our eyes the real difficulty comes when trying to achieve something more strategic.

Acquisitions & Mergers

Take an acquisition of a company by another. They may have the great fortune of being on the same ERP platform, but there is little comfort in this as human interpretation comes into play. Even if the quality of data is high, the format and completeness of the data is likely different. This gave the writer a great deal of joy when managing 4 acquired businesses into a newly built national distribution centre.

Procurement

If we turn to procurement, then spend analytics and the wonderful world of taxonomy comes into play. It is here we see human creativity at its best, with suppliers being misclassified, often duplicated and frequently inaccurate. Now there are some really bright solutions out there to help, we are fond of Eddie McGeachie of Accelerated Insight ( www.accelerated-insight.com ) who has real insight on the use of novel and modern analytical skills in this field. Without great spend analytics you cannot build a reliable and high performing procurement strategy. What is the starting point for the majority of procurement spend we have seen? I will be polite and say not as good as it needed to be.

Logistics buying: Success is specification!

But if we come to the discipline of logistics, matters get depressing. If the quality of information provided to LSPs at tendering stage is taken as an example: very depressing!

I do wonder at the rush to automation and whether due and appropriate consideration has been given to the data needs. We talk “automation” and “digitalisation” and “digital passports”. We should do data hygiene and examine the training of those that enter data, often underpaid, undertrained and under-appreciated clerical grades. As these folks are often the foundation on top of which we build our digital futures.

A helping hand

At LOGURU we believe in building firm foundations for all the projects we engage in, if you are struggling to achieve clarity from data in your logistics operations or procurement process, come and have a chat!

www.loguru.co.uk

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