The Challenge: An ERP Implementation with Messy Data
Founded in 1978, Pioneer Eclipse has built a global business on the premise of “keeping things clean”. The company is fervent in its crafting of products that serve the floor care industry to reduce labor and costs. After just six years in business, Inc. Magazine ranked the company as one of the nation’s 100 fastest growing privately held companies.
Today, Pioneer Eclipse is a subsidiary of Amano, with a sales presence in more than 40 countries. From its 100,000 square-foot facility industry in North Carolina, the company produces floor care and sanitation equipment on a large scale. Throughout the manufacturing of 30 million gallons of cleaning product per year, operational data is in no short supply.
More often than not, businesses that ignore large amounts of cluttered data tend to run into a substantial mess, leading to time-intensive cleanup efforts. With an approach of cleanliness to its business model, it came as no surprise that Pioneer Eclipse wanted the same for its internal data. In a recent endeavor to install and implement JD Edwards Enterprise One, IT leaders at Pioneer Eclipse recognized its master data was not as organized and as polished as they would have preferred.
Having gone through similar projects in the past, Pioneer Eclipse understood data cleanliness to be the foundation for a successful ERP platform deployment. So, IT leaders sought to avoid the classic junk in/junk out solution that would result in not realizing the full value of its ERP investment.
The Solution: Cleansing Data by means of Reporting Software
In the modern economy, successful businesses grow and thrive by nurturing and harvesting their data. The power to retrieve, dissect, and distribute relevant data unearths telling information, distinguishes trends, and streamlines operations. JDE data is capable of behaving as a central hub of truth, serving all areas of business operations to coordinate resources and effort. Pioneer Eclipse knew in order to make that idea a reality, its enterprise data would have to be clean and reliable.
Utilizing Data Access Studio (DAS) and Automator from ReportsNow, Pioneer Eclipse developed a portfolio of integrity, exception, and error reports. DAS is a JDE-centric reporting and business intelligence solution while Automator enables scheduling, emailing, and bursting of reports. These tools identify budding complications throughout the JDE implementation process — before they can grow into multifaceted problems. As a result, Pioneer Eclipse can spot potential issues with address book records, item masters, and other critical business data before they manifest.
Process Integrity
Pioneer Eclipse IT has since applied the same approach to real-time processes of ensuring ongoing data reliability. For example, an accounts payable report now flags invoices containing dissimilar dates than the corresponding general ledger. A general accounting report is capable of detecting when work is set up for the wrong customer. A distribution report seeks item exceptions in areas such as pound/metric conversion, country of origin, freight class, or negative quantity on hand. As a result, the appropriate personnel are able to enact modifications and ensure the processes that depend on record keeping continue to function reliably.
Conditional Alerts
Following the creation of reports to establish and maintain JDE data integrity, Pioneer Eclipse pivoted to improving distribution of data to line-of-business personnel and decision makers. With Automator, the team generates reports to be distributed automatically to the proper personnel when certain conditions are met.
For example, when internal data reveals particular production lines to be lagging, Automator instantly generates a report to be distributed immediately to the responsible staff. Consequently, conditional alerts empower Pioneer Eclipse to be more proactive in addressing business conditions falling outside acceptable ranges of performance.
Reliable Data, Improved Processes, Empowered Workforce
Scores of businesses use ReportsNow to solve reporting demands. Giving more power to end users relieves IT departments of repetitive report creation and modification requests. Pioneer Eclipse uses DAS to allow users to run and adapt the reports on their own schedule (self service).
However, Pioneer’s use of the ReportsNow product line as a data integrity/exception management solution stands out. The company has transferred data from its legacy system to JDE with the confidence that critical records would be reliable and up to specifications before going live. These efforts have saved countless hours of troubleshooting and testing while setting the stage for process integrity reporting and conditional alerts. When all is said and done, Pioneer Eclipse walked away with a long-term enhancement of JDE data, processes, and users.
