With data being the new gold of the digital transformation era, the cost impact of data quality is becoming more and more relevant. In today’s world data is used for decision making across the entire organization. Are companies aware of the economic impact data quality problems can have on their business?

This article will show you how: By leveraging an enterprise solution, SAP Information Steward and applying a lean methodology Six Sigma, we can offer companies clear evidence of their data quality, the economic impact their business is suffering from quality issues and, even more important, the right tools to minimize this cost.

SAP® Information Steward

SAP® Information Steward is an information management tool that offers a combination of data profiling, data lineage and metadata management tools, providing organizations with continuous insights on all their data.

By using its different modules in a methodological way, we provide our customers with clear visibility and control of potential costs associated with data quality.

Six Sigma methodology

Six Sigma is a pretty well-known methodology to improve business processes. By definition: “Six Sigma strategies seek to improve the quality of the output of a process by identifying and removing the causes of defects and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes”.

It consists of going through 5 phases:

SAP® Information Steward allows us to perform each of the five mentioned phases

Phase 1: define costs associated with data inconsistencies

SAP® Information Steward allows to implement data rules in data within your Information Systems, keeping consistent standards of data quality and following compliance with the enterprise strategy. We use the Data Insight module to provide customers with a clear visibility of costs associated with non-conformities of their data, together with human resources costs for the resolution of these inconsistencies:

SAP® Information Steward offers the ability to identify characteristics that are critical to data quality by quickly profiling the different data sources all company processes use. It provides a quick overview of values, strings, completeness and distribution. This gives us a first insight to understand in a very accessible way the quality of all information processes and helps take initial actions to reduce costs by solving some issues directly at the source.

Phases 2 and 3: Analysis of costs over time and reduction of data management operations costs

We use now the Metadata Management module included in SAP® Information Steward to dramatically reduce the costs of Data Analysis. Cost savings are not only produced as a result of the reduction of time spent on the analysis itself, but also due to being able to identify the origins of issues and fix errors within the source system’s environment. This generates again important savings, both in time and in potential secondary impact resulting from avoiding the need to modify the original information process .

Phase 4: obtaining a detailed control of costs associated with data quality

By using a visual scorecard utility from the Data Insight module, we provide our clients with a detailed and continuous analysis of their data quality and cost trends associated with data issues.

The clear view of which data sources are contributing to the costs within the Information Systems allows customers to prioritize their actions by focusing on the most important issues that impact the business.

Phase 5: very low cost of expertise

The good news is that SAP® Information Steward is a very user-friendly and intuitive tool. Any regular business user with the right permissions can use it, monitor and validate data quality without the need of technical support.

Summary and insights

With the ever-increasing quantity of data and the business value contained within, we see SAP® Information Steward and other similar tools as a must-have for our clients. As organizations transition to becoming data-driven companies, they will need to have clear control and visibility of their data quality and a good assessment of the economic impact quality losses can bring to their businesses. Data is a key asset for business performance – the new gold of the 21st century!

At Clariba, we are experts in data quality assessment and improvement. As the #1 SAP Analytics expert partner, we have delivered the most advanced data storage, transformation and integration solutions, capable of ingesting, transforming and combining data coming from uncountable internal and external sources to customers worldwide.

 Feel free to contact us to discuss how we can help you better manage your data. Our experts will be delighted to support you.