The role of master data as a digital copy of real business objects is becoming ever more important in the age of digitalisation, S/4HANA, Industry 4.0, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Consistently high-quality master data is the basis for efficient business processes. That’s why Franke Kitchen Systems was looking to replace the manual evaluation of its master data with a more efficient solution, enabling the company to improve data quality continuously and in line with its process needs.
Franke now uses cbs Master Data Validation (cbs MDV), comprehensive standard software for evaluating, monitoring, and optimising master data. The solution provides a user-friendly cockpit for defining company-specific business rules for data quality management. The solution enables problems and opportunities to be identified faster and even allows master data to be evaluated in monetary terms.
Access to up-to-date technical data
As every cook knows, it takes more than just good ingredients to prepare first-class meals. Meticulous preparation is key to success alongside experience, creativity, and skill. For Franke
Kitchen Systems, this preparation begins with planning residential kitchens. To perfectly tailor the Swiss company’s high-quality kitchen systems to customers’ specific requirements, planners need to access up-to-date technical data, specifications, illustrations, and model variants of the individual components at all times.
Basic information about all business processes
To allow customers to select the products that are right for them, key information such as technical specifications, dimensions, photos, prices, and installation instructions must always be correct. But if this master data is not optimally maintained, planning errors can rapidly arise. Incorrect information on dimensions or the allocation of raw materials, for example, inevitably give rise to unnecessary waste during production, and, in the worst-case scenario, the corrections required can even lead to delivery deadlines being missed. The inevitable consequences are loss of customer confidence and inefficient internal workflows that generate unnecessary costs.
Experience shows that efficient business processes are impossible without correct master data. Current master data is becoming ever more important in the age of digitalisation, S/4HANA, Industry 4.0, and the Internet of Things (IoT). This is why monthly measurement of master data quality has been a routine task at Franke for a year now. In the past, Patricia Venzlaff, Master Data Manager in the Kitchen Systems Division, had to export the information stored in the SAP databases to determine the DQ (data quality) index and then painstakingly analyse the quality of the data in Excel using defined rules. This time-consuming, error-prone procedure had the disadvantage of not allowing the analysis criteria to be changed in line with requirements. While the result showed whether the content had been maintained better, as well as, or worse than in the preceding month, it did not indicate the cause of any errors found. “To find the sources of errors, I would have had to go through the entire process step by step,” says Patricia Venzlaff.
Efficient collaboration between equals
During the search for a solution to efficiently measure and optimise data quality in line with process needs, Master Data Validation (cbs MDV) software from cbs was recommended to the management. cbs Corporate Business Solutions, which has extensive knowledge of master data management, data migration, and data cleansing, proved to be an ideal partner for Franke. The cbs project team analysed the existing procedure, defined the requirements together with the users, and implemented these requirements in a prototype with the new release cbs Master Data Validation for SAP ERP & S/4HANA 1.5. “The software is easy to implement,” says Patricia Venzlaff. “Everyone in the cbs project team understood the problem from a management and a technical perspective. This generated ideas and solutions that we would never have come up with ourselves because we simply didn’t know the technical options available,” says Patricia Venzlaff, summing up the close cooperation.
As customer and supplier data was initially not to be included in the analysis, the project was confined to Franke’s material master data – in other words, to 350,000 articles with data on some 2.5 million production orders, 1.2 million purchasing document items, and just under 20 million sales document items. In addition to optimising data quality, the agenda included the where-used list and calculation of costs for reproducing material master data.
Tailored timetable for needs-based data analysis
Just three months later, planning and implementation were successfully completed. Since then, Patricia Venzlaff no longer needs to perform time-consuming manual master data maintenance and analysis. Instead, she extracts the data each month according to defined rules, which she creates in the easy-to-use cockpit of cbs MDV. This SAP-based control center requires no separate interface to the database and works smoothly with the existing fields. The master data manager can, for example, define routines to find out whether a stored value is valid and thus track down errors faster. Needs-based evaluations can now also be performed with little effort and provide visibility into even complex interrelationships. With just a few mouse clicks, for example, it is possible to calculate the total weight of a product by adding up the weights of its components. “What particularly makes the work easier is that I can use the new where-used list to check which master records were actually used,” stresses Patricia Venzlaff. “This allows me to exclude very new or very old articles, which are hardly ever used, from the analysis. And this is something I can also specify very easily in the cockpit.”
When people ask Patricia Venzlaff when she will finally complete master data cleansing, she smiles. Master data maintenance is an ongoing process that never ends. This is because, first, the data is in constant flux: addresses or account numbers change, the product range is expanded, the customer base grows, or there is a change in suppliers.
And second, the requirements for master data analyses are rising. This is why Franke recently introduced the release cbs MDV 2.0 SP005, completing what is, at least for now, the final stage on the path to optimisation. With the cbs MDV Reproduction Costs module, the company can at last determine the costs involved in creating and maintaining its master data and include these in its enterprise value.
Optimisation of data quality in line with process requirements
“The software is easy to implement. With cbs MDV, we’ve established a solid basis for continuously improving master data quality in line with our process needs. This solution helps us to identify errors and their causes faster. This has allowed us to significantly enhance the transparency of our master data,” states Patricia Venzlaff. The new data analyses have already enabled some processes to be optimised. “For example, we discovered that data quality in one business unit was below average,” explains the master data expert. “We then had the information involved maintained first by another department and then at an earlier stage of the process. This simple step noticeably improved the quality of our master data within one month. This optimisation would not have been possible without the insightful analysis from cbs MDV.”
