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Quickly Clean Your SAP Supply Chain Data of Pollution

insightsoftware -
July 1, 2022

insightsoftware is a global provider of reporting, analytics, and performance management solutions, empowering organizations to unlock business data and transform the way finance and data teams operate.

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In these unprecedented times, supply chains are more vulnerable than ever. They are the driver of every global company, manufacturer, and supplier, but they are increasingly susceptible to adverse risks. Businesses must now account for the disruptions and backlogs that are commonplace in today’s market. However, successful companies can leverage technology to turn this chaos into supply chain harmony.

Ridding your ERP of data pollution is the first step towards clarity amid all the confusion. The challenges that your inventory and stock levels have faced, impacting supply chains from production through delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic, has likely tainted your data. But now that borders have reopened and supply chains are returning to previous (or even greater) volumes, supply chain managers need clean data from their SAP ERP to provide an uncluttered view of the current and future health of their business.

Organize and Clean the Data You Rely On

For many companies, SAP data can be a lighthouse in the storm, helping overloaded employees navigate strained supply chains. With the help of operational reporting software that delivers interactive visualizations and actionable insights from SAP data, your teams and leaders can respond to volatile market conditions and outpace your competition.

But there is the potential for “pollution” in transactional SAP data. Pollution occurs as the variables change. Your data from last week will probably apply cleanly next week, but it is likely to be polluted six months down the road. Polluted data can create issues for users, including diminished trust in your ERP data, negative financial impacts (e.g., working capital and revenue), and difficult workloads. It is like the conventional saying, “garbage in = garbage out.” Pollution in transactional data mainly refers to open orders that were either fulfilled and never closed or never fulfilled at all. These orders are out of date and can pollute your data, making it harder for supply chain executives to understand supply and demand make future decisions.

Without purpose-built supply chain reporting technology, managers of these processes who are using polluted SAP data are often unaware that it is even polluted. It is hard to get a full picture of your supply chain data with operational reporting software, so supply chain executives are flying blind, working with inaccurate and outdated information. This can make it more difficult to set and execute strategy, leading to slow and poor decision making. Stock projections will be incorrect, impacting finances like working capital and revenue. Ultimately, polluted data can lead to lower customer satisfaction and internal distrust in your SAP data.

Easily Identify Pollution in Your Data Stream

Thankfully, robust technology solutions can be easily connected to your SAP system to alleviate your data pollution woes. Angles for SAP delivers advanced analytics, enabling users to identify and remove common data pollutants. Removing the polluted orders improves on-time, in-full (OTIF) numbers. Pollutants occur when old orders remain in the system. Either they were fulfilled and not closed out or they were never fulfilled for one reason or another. Angles for SAP is the best way to remove these orders from SAP.

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Angles for SAP works ‘’plug-and-play” on any SAP ERP, including both ECC and S/4HANA, to collect and prepare data so it is suitable to analyze. It understands context, connections, and integrations, and it simplifies data for business users. It then creates insights into what is happening at an operational level right now and in the foreseeable future by enriching the data with pre-built supply chain and finance calculations, on a transaction level (execution status, order bottlenecks) and in the form of operational KPIs (delivery reliability, stock level). These insights create answers to business questions. Insights can then be published directly or distributed by being pushed to or pulled by third-party BI tools.

Clean data results in efficient supply chains and efficient supply chains result in happy customers. Angles ensures that your SAP-produced data is clean, today, tomorrow, next week, even next year, as it consistently removes polluted data to ensure your ERP is using clean data only. It allows your company to fulfill your business needs and hit your production and delivery targets. Angles for SAP determines the root causes of pollution, cleans up current pollution, and prevents future data pollution.

  • Angles for SAP optimizes your ability to dig into the details, allowing you to:
    1. Pinpoint stock shortages, delays, and their root causes before picking and shipping.
    2. Understand lead times at each stage of the supply chain and identify consistent delays and bottlenecks.
    3. Remove wasted effort, inventory, and cash.
    4. Discover unnecessary purchases and production, slow-moving items, obsolete inventory, stock claimed by polluted orders, dead stock, and so on.
    5. Control risks and process compliance issues such as Segregation of Duty.
    6. Highlight purchases that can be delayed.
    7. Reduce partial shipments, late payments, and overtime.

Case Study: Clean Data Delivers Key Insights for Heineken

Use Angles for SAP to leverage your data to make insights easily accessible and consumable for your business users who need a fast, secure, and easy-to-use self-service experience for ERP data.

In one case study, the Heineken Group directly benefitted from using Angles for SAP, with results that included:

  1. Positive ROI from Angles for SAP achieved in weeks.
  2. Increased business user acceptance and use of the SAP system.
  3. Stronger grip on the overall performance of the supply chain.
  4. Better insights into the integrated supply chain process.
  5. Significant and immediate cash saving opportunities – without further expenditure.
  6. Improved reliability in master data and transactional data.

These positive results were welcomed by Heineken. To quote Fred Holvast, Logistics Director at Heineken Netherlands:

“Angles for SAP and the KPI Dashboard help the management of the breweries to get a better grip on the overall performance of the supply chain, which will ultimately help Heineken Netherlands to service its domestic and international customers better against lower cost … I was flabbergasted. Absolutely flabbergasted. We’ve managed to improve our data integrity by major, major steps.”

Read the full Heineken case study here

Clean data is here. Angles for SAP sees to that for today’s complex and vital supply chains, mitigating risk and leveraging clean data for your company. Click here to arrange a demo and see if Angles for SAP is right for your business.

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