Supply chain effectiveness hindered by `dirty data`, says Avellino

Avellino, a privately held data integration solutions vendor, is alerting large organisations that issues with the quality of inventory and supply data are almost certainly compromising the effectiveness of their supply chains and damaging profits and service. However, using data profiling and analysis software, they can identify key issues accurately, judge their impact and make objective cost/benefit decisions regarding their resolution.

The UK`s Ministry of Defence (MoD) saved lb20 million in inventory management costs as a direct result of improvements to data quality. The potential for such savings was identified when the MoD used Avellino Discovery, a data profiling and analysis solution, to audit the armed forces` supply data. The results enabled the analysis team to present objective evidence to business-level managers to justify a range of targeted data quality initiatives from which the savings resulted.

"Avellino Discovery is great for proving whether data is fit for purpose. When it comes to identifying problems, it is fast, accurate and much faster than manual approaches," said the MoD`s Lieutenant Colonel Nigel Stafford.

Discovery is also being used by BT Exact, BT`s research, technology and IT operations business, to help meet the data management needs of its customers across BT and elsewhere. Within BT, Discovery is enabling an accurate data model to be built for migrating data from multiple sources to a single inventory management system. This model is helping to ensure cost-effective, faster and more accurate data migration across the whole of BT, while at the same time also helping to identify assets that might otherwise have been under-utilised or, in rare cases, mislaid due to lost or missing data. These items are being returned to stock, thereby avoiding new capital expenditure.

Nigel Turner, data quality consultancy manager for BT Exact, said: "BT Exact has helped to develop the comprehensive information policy used to manage data across BT. My team helps implement that policy by evaluating and ensuring the quality of enterprise-wide data sources. To achieve this, we need tools that enable us to evaluate data quality quickly. Avellino Discovery is helping us highlight data issues in clear terms, so business owners can quickly see the likely impact and understand the importance of resolving them. In turn, this helps us to raise the profile of the importance of data quality across the business."

Andreas Bitterer, Research Director with META Group, commented: "Supply chain integration is particularly vulnerable to data quality issues, such as data inconsistency, duplication, incompleteness or non-standardisation, letting businesses accidentally order too many products, or too few, or ship the wrong kind, or receive on the wrong date."

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"Problem handling of these incidents wastes time and money both at the supplier and in the customer`s own organisation. Through data profiling, these issues can be greatly reduced. Areas of data mismatch can be identified, therefore lowering cost and increasing reliability throughout the supply chain," he said.

Given that data is structured differently for various applications throughout the supply chain, the process of drawing that data together into a quality whole to enable integrated supply chain management is extremely challenging and is often the cause of the data anomalies which impact effectiveness. Just as the MoD and BT have done, many large businesses could quickly cut costs in supply chains by using Discovery to identify inefficiencies caused by `dirty data`.

"Business leaders know that effective supply chains, and indeed all information dependent processes, rely on accurate information. But when you get down to the information building blocks, the data itself, even IT chiefs often have only a `gut feel` as to how good their data really is," said Tony Rodriguez, CEO of Avellino.

"Avellino Discovery gives managers and data analysts an automated and totally accurate analysis of data quality. With Discovery, businesses can judge the fitness for purpose of data and make objective decisions on targeted, high return data quality projects. Such actions can quickly improve supply chains performance and deliver benefits to customers and to the bottom line."

For companies implementing CRM, data warehousing, ERP, SCM, business intelligence or consolidating their enterprise data, Avellino Discovery provides the solution to ensure that accurate and consistent data is delivered to enable such business initiatives.