Precisely Champions Data Integrity

⇨ Companies moving to SAP S/4HANA in the near-term should ensure that their data is sufficiently prepared for a move.

⇨ With automation, AI, and analytics at the forefront of strategy discussions, businesses must keep the five pillars of data integrity – integration, governance and quality, location intelligence, enrichment, and master data management – in mind.

⇨ Solutions like Automate Studio and Automate Evolve allow companies to streamline critical SAP processes so they can react quickly to market changes and allow business users to focus on value-added work.

The technological landscape for businesses is evolving more rapidly than ever. Organizations need to be able to pivot their strategies quickly to adapt to market conditions. This is easier said than done – enterprises cannot become agile unless their data strategy allows them to do so. Companies need high-integrity data accessible in real-time.

The data integrity experts at Precisely provide a foundation for companies to get the most out of their data by providing accuracy, consistency, and context. Companies need to be able to trust their data to make decisions quickly and confidently. Without data integrity, this is impossible.

Five Pillars of Data Integrity

There are five key pillars that data must have so organizations can trust the information they are using to make decisions:

• Integration: Data integration covers the movement of data from one location to another. Many organizations have data trapped inside of a mainframe and want to relocate it to a destination that allows them to do more robust analytics. Integration enables organizations to leverage multiple different data sources and multiple different destinations. This also includes the use of automation capabilities to help streamline and automate processes across a company’s SAP landscape – enabling businesses to move faster, stay agile, and make an impact at scale.
• Governance and Quality: In order to understand, trust, and use data for better decisions, organizations must be able to govern, observe, improve its quality, and master it, utilizing a set of reference data to ensure accuracy. Precisely checks its data sets against reference sets to ensure that customers are working with accurate information to drive better decisions.
• Location Intelligence: Location-based insights are growing more important for organizations that want to be truly data-driven. Precisely drives insights through location-based data, giving organizations a leg-up on competition by differentiating between the needs of their customers based on location. Location-based data can also be vital for companies looking to overcome supply chain challenges.
• Enrichment: Data requires context and layered information to reach its full potential. Precisely enriches data with reference data from over 400 datasets containing more than 9000 attributes give users the ability to understand consumer or competitors better. Normalized and rationalized data can be used to drill deeper into income, demographics, transportation patterns, and more – this helps build unique and powerful use cases for businesses.
• Master Data Management: When data is siloed across various data domains, companies can be held back from maximizing its value. Creating a “golden record” for strategic data assets across business systems and channels helps to enable better data decision-making.

Precisely can cleanse, harmonize, and enrich data so it has the breadth, depth, and context that allows businesses to make the best decisions possible in real-time, giving them a competitive advantage. The Precisely Strategic Services team are also on hand to help customers meet their data integrity goals, providing a range of consultative services that are tailored to the specific requirements of the business.

SAP Process Automation

Precisely’s acquisition of Winshuttle in 2021 expanded its portfolio to enable support for different types of SAP customers looking to improve the way they work. Some SAP customers are not planning to move from their current version of SAP ECC for at least a few more years, but still want to improve their capabilities and keep up with the demand for reduced cycle times.

Other SAP customers who are moving, whether that is through RISE with SAP or other methods, turn to Precisely for help achieving a truly clean core. Precisely’s Automate Studio (formerly Winshuttle Studio) solution allows users to manage SAP processes in Excel so they can make mass data changes quickly.

“Automate Studio is amazing at helping customers fix what they have where they have it as they move. It is vital to be able to do these bulk downloads and extracts, validate, update, and then put the data back into the old SAP system so it transitions to the new system or actually sits as the middleware. As the data is moving, we are enhancing, enriching, cleansing, and normalizing that content,” said Patrick McCarthy, Chief Revenue Officer at Precisely.

For instance, while many SAP users appreciate the functionality of Fiori, they often need improved capabilities to operate at scale. Users attempting to complete hundreds if not thousands of journal entries on a short deadline leverage the Automate Studio solution to meet deadlines while keeping some of the look and feel of Fiori.

However, for more complex, data-intensive, master data processes that require workflow, customers turn to the Automate Evolve (formerly Winshuttle Evolve) platform to drive greater efficiencies through the use of business-friendly forms. This helps companies to achieve greater speed, greater agility, less complexity, and more flexibility in the organization.

Customer Proof Points

There are several examples of recent customers that worked with Precisely to drive SAP process automation fueled with high integrity data and unlock real business value.

The food giants Kellogg Company struggled to manage their customer data from an Excel-based solution. The sheer quantity of data that the company had to sift through led to routing inconsistencies, creating audit and customer relationship problems.

Kellogg Company turned to Precisely Automate solutions to simplify customer master data management processes so users could work more efficiently and accurately. The forms tool helped to solve the routing issues by building in data governance. With this solution, the risk of incorrect invoices going out diminished, ensuring Kellogg Company maintained a strong relationship with its partners. Automate also streamlined business processes, allowing the company to meet its deadlines.

Another example is French cosmetics brand Groupe L’Occitane. The company has more than 3,400 stores in nearly 100 countries, so it had to manage master data for roughly 300,000 products in SAP. Groupe L’Occitane was concerned that its master data management process was not efficient enough and that duplicate records were scattered and siloed across different systems, negatively impacting the customer experience.

Groupe L’Occitane used Automate Studio to make its SAP data processing time run four times faster. The tool needs no additional maintenance so business users can create and update scripts themselves, allowing IT teams to focus on other tasks. The solution also eliminated the need for manual data entry, which not only saves time, but improves data quality and accuracy.

To address the issue of scattered and silo customer data, Groupe L’Occitane set up a data lake and master data management system to improve analysis and control of its customer data. It was able to integrate data from 10 different systems with using Precisely data quality solutions. This helped reduce the time required to deduplicate customer records from more than two hours to about five minutes, so they can perform the process daily.

What This Means for SAP Insiders

Find Solutions that fit your SAP journey. Organizations must consider where they are and where they want to be, in terms of their SAP systems. Companies moving to SAP S/4HANA in the near-term should ensure that their data is sufficiently prepared for a move. Those aiming to continue using their SAP ECC systems for a little longer should consider systems that allow them to make the most of their current system and can seamlessly transition with them when they make the move to SAP S/4HANA.

Prioritize Data Integrity. With automation, AI, and analytics at the forefront of strategy discussions, businesses must keep the five pillars of data integrity – integration, governance and quality, location intelligence, enrichment, and master data management – in mind. Information needs to be accurate, consistent, and kept in context if businesses want to be able to make smarter decisions in real-time.

Automation is a must. Companies that do not prioritize the automation of manual business processes risk falling behind. Solutions like Automate Studio and Automate Evolve allow companies to streamline critical SAP processes so they can react quickly to market changes and allow business users to focus on value-added work, rather than manual data entry or data management tasks.