Data Quality and Standardization

A large supermarket wholesaler had over 1000 organization units within their E-Business Suite as a result of their aggressive acquisition strategy. As they started to analyze their policies, they discovered that the same customer had many different types of contracts and there were inconsistent discount policies, payment terms, and even prices across the organization. Sometimes a truck would deliver two or three times a week to the same customer from the same warehouse. Since margins in the grocery business are very low, they realized that by renegotiating and standardizing their contracts and by reorganizing their warehouse deliveries, they would save millions of dollars.

Solution

The company consolidated their org units into 20 organizations structured around customer types using eprentise Reorganization software’s MS Organization Units module. After merging the org units, they were able to coordinate all the orders for a customer, and even able to offer better discounts based on the customer’s buying patterns because all transactions were within a single organization unit. They were able to schedule deliveries on a consistent basis and offer better service to their customers.

Problem

Two electronics companies merged. One of the companies was much smaller, but still on E-Business Suite, so the decision was made to load the inventory data into the larger company’s E-Business Suite instance. Both companies carried similar products, but of course the catalog numbers, descriptions, pricing, and inventory locations needed to be changed for the smaller company.

Solution

The company decided to use eprentise Reorganization software’s MSM Inventory Organizations module. Before consolidating, they used eprentise software to change the system item flexfield of the smaller company. Within the eprentise temporary workspace, they loaded the items from both systems and established criteria for standardizing the data and determining duplicates across the instances. There were some times when the item appeared in the source and not in the target. Other times, the item was in the target, and not in the source. They found out that about 22% of their existing inventory were duplicate items. Adding the new inventory added about 40% duplicate items. When resolving the duplicate items, they decided to use the attributes and pricing of the target items. eprentise renumbered all the items, and changed all the relevant transactions to reflect the changed data. The company reduced their inventory value by 12% and saved an additional 10% of inventory value by standardizing on the min/max reorder points.

Problem

A retail company was set up to have each of their businesses (the catalog business, the photo studio, the optometry department, the jewelry department) in different sets of books in their E-Business Suite. As a result, they didn’t know when the same customer made purchases from each of the businesses. They wanted to go to a CRM system to understand who their customers are so that they could market better to those customers and become more competitive.

Solution

First, the company needed to change their charts of accounts so that the different sets of books would have the same chart of accounts. They used FlexField software to change the accounting flexfield. When they changed their chart of accounts, they also set up the department segment to be the cost center segment so that they could track the costs across the business in the same way. The company then used eprentise Reorganization software’s MS Sets of Books module to merge their sets of books. After they merged their sets of books, they set up security rules on the department segment to limit access to a business.

After years of running E-Business Suite 11.5.9, a global company was planning an upgrade to R12 but realized that it would be difficult to utilize the additional functionality of R12 without cleaning up the data first. While they previously had several sets of books to accommodate different statutory and regulatory requirements as well as different currencies, they wanted to use the subledger accounting features of R12 and use a single primary ledger along with multiple subsidiary ledgers that would handle the local requirements.

Solution

The company used FlexField software to change the accounting flexfields in each set of books to the same chart of accounts and put its accounts in clean logical ranges, standardizing the accounting structure and making consolidated financial reporting easier. They then used eprentise Reorganization software’s MS Sets of Books module to consolidate the different sets of books into a single set of books to prepare the instance for subledger accounting with a single primary ledger in R12.