From fragmented data to a governed enterprise roadmap

A consumer beauty products business operating across the UK and France, with separate systems for product information, ERP, planning and outsourced logistics and manufacturing.

Spreadsheets and manual reconciliation bridged gaps between systems. Inconsistent product identifiers, changes made outside the system of record and limited visibility into failed file transfers created rework across order to cash, procure to pay, inventory and planning.

• Traced items, customers and vendors, alongside purchase and sales transactions, receipts, inventory adjustments and planning data, from creation and transfer through storage and use.
• Reviewed how product information, Business Central, planning tools and external partners exchanged data. For example, one retail barcode could map to several internal stock codes, making product and transaction reconciliation harder.
• Validated the findings and sequenced the recommendations with business and IT stakeholders.

• Stabilise and control: assign owners, agree publishing and approval rules, standardise identifiers and establish a data quality baseline.
• Automate and optimise: standardise ingestion, automate retries and reconciliation, and give operational teams one place to see and resolve failures.
• Modernise: establish a shared data lake and warehouse, catalogue data and build consistent reporting from curated models.

The assessment and roadmap were delivered. The platform changes and benefits described in the roadmap are recommendations.