Why it’s important to clean your suppliers
If you’re embarking on changing or upgrading your ERP or P2P system, it’s essential for you to clean your suppliers.
Here’s why. If you have an old, aged system, think of all the different versions of the same supplier you’ll have in your system. Some will be legitimate, some not. They could have old or incorrect addresses, even the old company name if they’ve been bought out, sometimes from many years before. We’ve seen it all!
Now consider the implications of this. From something as serious as fraud, to accidental duplicate payments on two separate accounts for the same supplier. Or perhaps orders are being sent to the wrong contact and don’t turn up on time. In any of those instances it’s a costly problem.
Cleaning your suppliers prevents these problems but must be done before you upload data to your new system. Doing so afterwards will be challenging, costing you additional time, money and inconvenience.
How our supplier cleaning service works
Step 1 – Merging your suppliers
We take your supplier data, from single or multiple file sources and merge them together. You’ll need to keep the legal/financial entities separate, but we can create a new column for normalised suppliers if required.
Step 2 – Validate & reformat
We’ll then go through and validate the addresses and phone numbers before reformatting them to your preferred standard, and will populate any missing town, county or country information, if available.
Step 3 – Deduplication
Now it’s time to deduplicate your data and create a unique “master” or “golden” record to act as your master record.
Enriched supplier data
You may need enriched supplier data. If so, we work with our partner to enrich data with information such as Parent Company, company registration numbers orDUNS numbers.
Read Susan's book Between The Spreadsheets
Between the Spreadsheets: Classifying and Fixing Dirty Data covers everything from data classification, normalisation, and taxonomy design, Between the Spreadsheets shows how the COAT framework helps organisations create consistent, trustworthy data.
Get in touch
For more information about how we work or any of our services, feel free to contact us using the form below.