MAY 2024CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM8CXO InsightsIN MY VIEWasmin is a business analyst who recently started working for a manufacturer. Excited to explore opportunities for process improvement, she becomes familiar with the various processes and systems. Very quickly she notices how many spreadsheets are being used. Since the organization has an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, she expects fewer spreadsheets would be necessary. As she investigates further, she confirms that many of the spreadsheets are being used in place of the ERP system, which is underused. Having seen this phenomenon before, she knows exactly what to do next.Spreadsheets are an invaluable business tool. They can be customized to fit the simplest of needs, such as a list of registrants for an event, to the very complex, such as a departmental budget with actual costs integrated in real time from an accounting system. Since their invention, spreadsheets have found their way onto most business and home computers. However, spreadsheets, by their very nature, are decentralized, each maintaining its own set of standalone data. This can become a problem for organizations when the convenience and personal control of spreadsheets causes data to be shifted away from centralized corporate systems, such as an ERP system. For the purposes of this discussion, we will use the ERP system as a proxy for any corporate system that maintains centralized data. The migration of data away from ERP systems and into spreadsheets can be small and unintentional. For instance, someone needs to manage a single piece of information that does not appear to have a home in the ERP system. So, a spreadsheet is created for this new information along with some related data taken from the ERP system. Over time, this spreadsheet becomes the more convenient and fuller source of truth, and double entry of data into the ERP system seems redundant and unnecessary. So, some data is no longer entered into the ERP system. This will likely impact other users, but if they don't investigate why things changed, they begin to lose trust in the ERP system and create spreadsheets of their own. Left unchecked, this cycle can cascade through the business and result in significant exodus of data from the ERP system. Over time, the business can lose trust in a perfectly good ERP system, as it is no longer trustworthy.So, what does trusted data look like? Think of the 4 C's or C to the power of 4 (and we do mean power, because trusted data is a powerful thing!). Data must be:· Correct - an accurate reflection of what it represents,· Complete - all information that is required by all data consumers is entered,· Current - entered in a timely enough manner for data consumers' needs,· Consistent - the above C's are applied all the time. These rules are critical to maintaining trusted data. The more they are broken, the less data will be trusted, leading to disengagement from the system and more investment in spreadsheets. Once trust is lost, it can be hard to rebuild. SHIFTING FROM MANUAL REPORTS TO ERP SYSTEMSRAY HOPE, VICE PRESIDENT, INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, QUALICOJRay Hope
< Page 7 | Page 9 >