Having reliable and clean data as a company is a make it break it situation. One of the most important business investments is having an inventory optimization software to be the security guard on your data. So, what happens when you have unreliable data? The end of the world in business terms. It means there is a severe disconnect between departments and the supply chain. The larger the company, the deeper the damage.
It all starts with looking at the job that the data managing professionals in these companies are doing in a typical week. The findings are interesting. Over 70% of the time they’re cleaning up data, they must clean up again.
Having a team is great, but you’re paying them a salary. Imagine paying a team to put out fires while the primary work backs up. This is not cost-effective. That could mean many hours spent playing catch up. The worst part is it will never end because the data is not being stabilized. The investment in inventory optimization software must become a number one priority.
What to do about it?
The most common money-draining issue is how companies deal with the dirty data situation without inventory optimization software. The best example and most straightforward example is treating disease. If you don’t treat the core cause, you’re only putting a bandage on the symptom and it’s going to come back and sometimes worse than before.
Another challenge is getting companies to fear automation less. The word brings to mind too many issues that they would understand are not valid once they partner with the right optimization software. The main comfort point is having a company that behaves like a partner and not a software sales machine.
Benefits of Optimization Software:
A great company stress reliever is when they implement the ERP and watch the data available in real-time across all departments. The incidents of old data will disappear. This alone will cut your losses. Freedom, efficiency, and accuracy are what’s delivered. Employees can share data seamlessly. They may connect the software to their eCommerce sites so it all flows.
The ERP solution will stop misleading data. Working with numbers and statistics that aren’t accurate or are outdated, creates a snowball effect. Each department your data moves through makes impactful decisions based on that data. So, the results and are hurting the company.
Duplicate data is another issue that causes a time-consuming cleanup. You’re paying for unraveling and reorganization, and that’s wasteful.
Inaccurate data is self-explanatory, and it ends in financial disaster. Sometimes, depending on the company you have, it could end in legal entanglements. Check the laws regarding the data you keep for privacy concerns and more so customer dissatisfaction is another dominant issue brought about by incorrect dates. Another issue is the loss of inventory. Inaccurate data can lead to inventory loss and rising shrinkage costs.
Non-integrated Data is why you need a solution that integrates the data streams between departments and all of your management platforms. A clean line of communication is best for administrative harmony, as opposed to horror.
Data that violates business rules is also an issue. This can come about because of bad or absent data cleaning automation. You could bring unnecessary legal or company culture issues you don’t see coming and you may not want to handle.
Then we have data that are not readable or at least improperly punctuated and misspelled. This is embarrassing and will cause misunderstandings.
Delays in manufacturing. Companies who rely on a physical supply chain can face total business loss in a short period with a dirty data issue that’s ongoing. All companies have to face dirty data issues that we’ve listed here. Not many will have them all happen at the same time, but dirty data issues are like a disease. It will infiltrate the system and rot the company from the inside out. It’s as we said, a ‘snowball’ effect. Once you have the wrong information, the end result is disastrous.
In terms of delayed manufacturing, this will affect the company on the company side and on the customer fulfillment end. Today, with social media and immediate reviews delayed manufacturing is not the area that you want to be lax in. Investing in just this if nothing else is a major boost in protecting your reputation.
The last important point is understanding that most companies put data cleaning on the back burner and continue with what we called Band-Aid solutions. It happens because companies think they have to clean data as one extensive project all at once. This isn’t true. The best way to handle this is by using the software to tackle the process in small manageable chunks. Make sure you are prioritizing it according to business value. Don’t put it all on your IT team. Try to pepper it about the entire staff where appropriate.
