Data Quality Solution Enables Real-time Correction Inside SAP

Postal addresses are difficult to standardize and verify – streets frequently are misspelled, abbreviations are used inconsistently and ZIP codes (especially ZIP+4 codes) may not match the rest of the address.  As a result, every year millions of pieces of mail are sent to inaccurate, undeliverable addresses.  

Utilizing official address directories from postal authorities, Business Objects’ Data Services offers on-demand verification of any address in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, Japan, and a dozen other countries.  Business Objects also maintains its own indexes for countries without official postal directories, providing at least some level of address validation for virtually every country on earth.  What’s more, if an address is close but not quite right, Data Services provides valid suggestions for correcting the address.

Directories aside, using a data quality management (DQM) solution from Business Objects, it is possible to connect the address cleansing capabilities of Data Services directly to an ERP or CRM system.  DQM Solutions currently are available for SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle PeopleSoft, and Oracle Siebel.

Advanced Solution Eliminates Waste Caused by Bad Addresses

Our client, an international manufacturer of lighting systems for theaters and stages, has an SAP R/3 ERP implementation with more than 35,000 customer and vendor addresses.  The client knew that many of its addresses were inaccurate or incomplete, including those of some of its own sales and distribution centers.  

Dunn Solutions Group was brought in to assess the SAP R/3 system landscape, perform the initial installation and configuration of Data Services, and set up the communication link between Data Services and SAP.  Business Add-Ins (BAdIs) specifically designed for postal validation and duplicate address checking were then installed on each SAP system in their landscape.  Behind the scenes, these BAdIs send data entered through the SAP user interface to Data Services, enabling real-time address correction and duplicate record discovery within the familiar SAP GUI.

After completing the DQM installation on the client’s DEV and QAS systems, Dunn Solutions worked closely with users to ensure they were comfortable with the integrated service before moving to production.  Reports generated automatically by Data Services also helped the client to gain valuable insight into the errors in their data.

DQM Integrates Smoothly, Corrects Existing Addresses and New Contact Information 'On the Fly'

Of the 35,000-plus international addresses in the client’s SAP system, 29,000 (more than 80%) had errors:

  • Data Services was able to correct and standardize around 25,000 (86%) of the erroneous address without any manual intervention and within a matter of minutes.
  • The remaining 4,000 addresses – deemed by Data Services to be too ambiguous or incomplete to fix automatically – were flagged in an error report within SAP for follow-up and manual correction later.
SAP users across all of the business units found the new address cleansing screens to be intuitive, and required only minimal training before they began using the DQM Solution in their day-to-day work.