DATA CLEANSING AND ENRICHMENT

Data Audit

First, you need to perform a thorough data assessment. The aim of the exercise is to gauge data quality and identify data issues. You also need to revisit existing business and validation rules and determine whether they need to be modified or added with new ones.

Other important tasks are building a report inventory, establishing which reports can be replaced with S/4 reporting and analytics, and identifying areas where new analytics need to be built.

Data Preparation

This stage is primarily focused on determining the plan and strategy to resolve the identified data issues. Usually, the issues are duplicate, corrupted, inconsistent, redundant, and incorrectly formatted data.

You need to decide what needs to be done to address these issues based on your business requirements and strategize data cleansing around them. It needs to work in tandem with your previously defined business rules.

Data Cleansing

Data cleansing is where the heart of the action is. It’s a process of removing or rectifying the above-mentioned data issues. The goal is to ensure that you have quality data based on these attributes:

Validity — The degree to which your data conforms to the defined business rules and validations

Accuracy — Closeness of data to the true values

Completeness — The extent to which all required data is available

Consistency — How consistent the data appears within data sets

Uniformity — The degree to which the data is specified using the same units of measure

Migration can then proceed once the data cleansing activity is completed.

Data Quality and Governance

Once your S/4HANA goes live, it will start processing new transactions. If the data generated isn’t validated, garbage data gets accumulated, resulting in garbage analysis. Not an ideal situation to be in!

That’s why a data governance process leveraging rules and validations should be in place. Most organizations would also appoint data stewards to delineate responsibilities and ensure process adoption across their business. Essentially, these measures help to guarantee rapid value realization in moving from ECC to S/4HANA.