At ProcureTech, we have a firm belief that only through a clear people, data and ecosystem strategy will you get the full benefit of whatever new digital procurement solutions you want to use across your enterprise.
Sponsored by Ivalua and Tealbook, the “Supply Chain Data Audit Guidelines” from the team at IADQGA is a great reminder of this main message that when it comes to DATA, you should start with an audit for confidence/governance before thinking about solutions and operation model structures you might want to embed.
Having seen multiple organisations struggle with data, it’s not hard to imagine the lost opportunities and burnt time within an organisation when data is not working effectively – indeed according to a MIT review by Thomas C. Redman, the cost of bad data has been estimated at 15-25% of a company’s revenue.
According to the paper – users should consider the following key steps when starting a data audit – basically establishing whether your data has relevance, completeness, accuracy, timeliness, velocity in your organization:
- Align on scope – where does your supply chain start and stop, where should it start and stop? Which processes does data link to and where does data influence critical decisions?
- What kind of data is involved – numerical vs. qualitative e.g. opinions and structured vs. unstructured e.g. non-standard formats?
- How do you assess the importance of data sets – e.g. which has the most value to you? How do you manage the variability in it? Where is the bias in your data sets? Which standards define your data sets and are you compliant?
- Understand the current data strategy – how/where/who stores and manages it; how is it aligned to processes? How do you and should you look at data e.g. technology, people, process, performance? How do you receive it, clean it?
- What are the learnings from your audit – what is the so what and then how do you establish a data audit process with agreed stakeholders, KPI’s and clear outcomes to hone/refine and drive data confidence!
We cannot recommend this paper enough for anyone who wants to think about these messages in their organization – from those just starting to think about a plan to audit/build a strategy to mature organisation who are using advanced prescriptive analytics– there are some really practical guidelines for everyone in here.
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