Data Shelter
Accurate and reliable master and transactional data for decision support systems is essential.
Advanced decision support systems, such as those for plant level and corporate level demand and supply planning are data sensitive and data intensive. Providing solid support for the business process of maintaining this data is vital for the validity and value provided by these planning systems.
The prime source of data is always the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. For corporate level planning, most likely there is more than one ERP system involved, often of different make or version. This situation is prominent in companies that have originated from mergers and acquisitions. The basic data is present but the finer set of data that makes the difference for planning is more than often maintained outside ERP in a plethora of spreadsheets. Different departments have different views on reality. A system that supports better collaboration is needed to obtain a single and unified perspective that forms the basis for the company plan.
In our projects we keep running into what we have labeled “Homeless Data©”, which is data that is required for decision support but cannot be sourced from or given a place in the legacy systems. That is why we created Data Shelter© a solution for homeless data. Data shelter will interact with your legacy systems and become the central repository of the additional data, also maintaining the data integrity rules on either side. It provides EXCEL® look and feel on top of the multi-user, collaborative database structure where data ownership, version control and approval processes can be set up reliably and precisely.
Benefits
It has allowed our customers to realize gains within their supply chain from using Outperform Planning without having to clean all the master data in their ERP system. It also helped them to understand the data needs of decision support system like Outperform Planning before setting them in the ERP system.
