Health Sector – Improving the management of data across the organisation
Introduction
The client is one of Australia and New Zealand’s leading manufacturers and suppliers of procedure packs and medical consumables for the public and private hospital markets.
In October 2022, Frazer Walker was engaged to provide data governance, strategy and management, data analysis, BI reporting and data quality, program management and data migration services.
The Challenge
The client had previously commenced a project to upgrade to a new ERP (MS Dynamics) from AX 2012, however the data in AX and several other systems had significant data quality problems (including many thousands of missing and incorrect data and unused data fields).
The client also elected to redevelop all its 5,000+ product SKU identifiers to enable logical groupings and growth in the portfolio, requiring the development of a whole new taxonomy for products that were clinically reviewed.
The company also was redeveloping its inventory units to operate from piece rather than carton level, a change that can only occur on a transition to a new system and which requires a complete redevelopment of their bill of materials for products and production.
Our Work
Frazer Walker provided professional services to assist the client to develop and improve its use of data across the organisation. This ranged from assisting in creating a new taxonomy for all product SKUs to developing the organisation’s data/AI strategy.
The ongoing project required upskilling of staff and management in the value and use of data, and associated roles and responsibilities, through to data migration services (upgrading to a new ERP), with data quality improvements for customer, product and vendor data. This was critically important given the client was also preparing for a new autonomous warehousing and distribution site, with autonomous guided vehicles, conveyor belts, robots, SCADA and MES systems, and ASRS.
Services also included developing a business intelligence (BI) workstream and critical analytical reporting and data pipelines for the redevelopment of key management and operational reports out of older legacy technology to PowerBI reports.
The Outcome
FW assisted the client with:
- Developing its first data/AI strategy
- Training sessions for staff on data, data roles and responsibilities and management of data assets
- Developing an initial data asset catalogue
- Redeveloping the inventory unit for products to piece from carton and associated changes to the bill of materials
- Developing and upgrading production routes
- Data extract, transform and load (ETL) services through developing a software application for the repeated extract, cleansing, augmenting, improving and loading of data into the new ERP system. Over 1 billion data points were cleaned, augmented and ETL from over 60 source systems.
- Development and initial management of a BI squad and workplan for systematically identifying and rebuilding legacy reports from old systems to the new ERP platform using PowerBI, including creating the data pipelines and critical analytical reports
- Assistance in developing the new taxonomy for product SKUs.
- Program management of the entire transition from AX to D365 FinOps