Supply Chain Date Integrity

 

Supply Chain Date Integrity

Guess what I have been doing for the last week or so? I have been scrubbing supply chain management data. You probably wonder what exactly is supply chain management data. You assure that the location and mailing addresses for the organization is correct. There are actual active contacts for the organization. Do they have a website? What types of products does the organization manufacture or distribute to their partners? What is the correct parent child relationships? Is there a broker relationship? What are the appropriate keywords for the organization to enable quick and meaningful search results. Are they associated with the correct lead company and have the correct partner number?

The beauty of Share-ify is that your supply chain partners can do a great deal of the data scrubbing for you on an ongoing basis. Data quality is a key component to the management of the supply chain. All the initial partner data is captured in the profile and the contact pages. Obtaining that first key contact for an organization will drive supply chain data management through joint collaboration efforts. Your partners will know before you do when their name or address changes. They can manage their contacts when personnel change positions within their organization.

When establishing a large data base of partners, you must have a process for the naming of the partners. Having a great naming procedure for partners will help prevent duplicate building of organizations in the supply chain management system. Examples of naming issues that may occur which could result in duplicate builds are the naming of an organization named Big Cow company as BC company, B C company, B. C. company, Big Cowl company, etc. Share-ify provides a highly flexible search function in addition to scripted reports to find your partners quickly within the data base. Share-ify provide additional naming cells to capture Alias (AKA) “Also Known As” names.

Address identification is important for the correct linkage of future document loading or communication. The organization may have both a physical and mailing address. Searching a data base by address can be enlightening to avoid duplicate building of organizations.

During the data scrubbing it is important to establish who is responsible for partner data management within a partner child relationship. Will each of the children be responsible? Will the parent organization be responsible? In some cases, the parent and the children may not be aware that they are providing products to another partner due to a distributor or broker relationship. The actual configuration of data relative to these relationships will provide clarity to management.

Keep your data great, Share-ify?