Review of Our Data Quality Management Solution D365 F&SCM

Data is a constant that flows through every business application in an organization. Data impacts business processes, decision making, productivity, and therefore also revenue for organizations. When you do not have any data management processes in place, deriving business insights can become challenging.

Forrester reports that one-third of analysts spend 40 percent of their time on average on checking their analytics data prior to deriving any valuable business intelligence that can help drive strategic decisions.

A data quality management solution can help you mitigate issues such as duplicate or incorrect data by automating duplicate data checks, adding business rules for validations, and setting up data patterns and web services. If your data quality management processes are set up and your team conducts periodic quality assessments, then deriving meaning from your data will not be as time-consuming and ineffective.

At STAEDEAN, we have worked with several customers who have opted for our data quality solution – Data Quality Studio for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management (D365 F&SCM).

Based on customer feedback we are also working on continuously upgrading our solutions. And for anyone considering Data Quality Studio, we wrote this article to transparently showcase the features, benefits, limitations, and licensing price of our Data Quality solution. This information will help you make an informed decision about whether or not our solution would be a good fit for your organization.

What is Data Quality Studio?

Data Quality Studio for Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management is a configurable solution that can help you set up business rules, data patterns, and web services to ensure better data quality across departments and companies within the ERP.

Using our solution, you can add data quality policies that validate data in real-time to ensure consistent and accurate data entry across the organization. This will in turn improve operational efficiency and data quality and ensure that the master data distributed is more reliable as it has been validated.

What are the features of Data Quality Studio for D365 F&SCM?

Add data quality rules

Data Quality Studio allows you to set up additional validation or enrichment rules at the field or record level to ensure correct values are entered. These rules can be set up conditionally based on the value/content in fields or tables.

Add data patterns

Using our solution, you can set up data patterns in the data validation rules that will ensure that the formatting is correct and consistent with the data entered.

Integrate web services

Create integrations with your own or third-party web services for example to validate email ids and postal addresses to check for any inaccuracies in data.

Alert users for incorrect data

Based on your data quality policies you can monitor data entry by users and flag inaccurate data entry so that users get a notification when there is an error and can focus on correcting the data.

Duplicate check

Avoid duplication of data by setting up comparison rules on data content. These will scan for duplicate records and prevent them from being entered into the application.

Quality assessment

Data Quality Studio also allows you to set up periodic quality assessments to validate and check older records with the set validation rules. This feature can be used when you are working in a new or changed setup or when the cleansing and validation rules are not directly enforced during data entry.

Organization assignments

Policies can be assigned to all organizations or to specific organizations within D365.

What are the benefits of Data Quality Studio for D365?

No development needed

Using our solution, you can configure your (master) data validation rules without any development efforts or costs for any data in Dynamics 365 F&O.

Improve data quality

By adding business rules, data patterns, and web services for validations, you have clean, consistent, and accurate data to derive business insights. As a result of reduced data entry errors, you will witness improvements in your master data and transactional data.

Avoid process problems

When master data is not correct in the system, this can lead to problems later in processes. For example, if all the necessary fields are not populated on the customer form you can get errors while processing an order.

Speed up data entry

If needed, you can set up actions to autocomplete fields with certain values. These fields can be set up as conditional, so the values will differ based on your business requirements.

Standardize data quality

You can configure, test, and execute validation rules quickly using Data Quality Studio. Additionally, you can avoid duplicate data being entered into the system by adding comparison rules that automatically scan for duplicates when data is being entered into the system. This saves you time and helps you standardize data processes across multiple sources.

Ensure data compliance

Using our solution, you can set up rules to ensure that the operational data is complete, valid, and accurate to meet compliance standards set by the organization.

Improve operations

You could improve data quality by setting up web services that validate data and in turn help streamline operations. Additionally, with data quality checks and rules you can eliminate poor data quality across departments, companies, and application landscapes that help you improve and run business operations smoothly.

Supports versioning

You can also support versioning in data quality policies by running data checks to assist in changes as and when required to ensure there is no missing data or errors in the process.

What are the limitations of Data Quality Studio for D365?

Lack of data entry workflow

Data Quality Studio assists you in adding data rules and validations but has no means to simplify data entry at the moment. However, STAEDEAN's Data Governance Solution offers functionality for workflow creation.

Data integration and master data management

Our data quality management solution does not offer functionality for data integration, data imports and exports, and master data distribution (MDM) for Dynamics 365. However, you can always opt for our Data Governance Solution instead of just Data Quality Studio. 

What is the cost of Data Quality Studio for D365?

The licensing price for our solution is priced at an annual subscription basis for a set number of base users.

This cost includes solution upgrades, standard training, and Essential support with minimal tickets. Additionally, you will also have to factor in implementation costs for initial setup and services costs if you will require more assistance post-implementation. For more information, please contact us.

Who is Data Quality Studio a good fit for?

If you are considering a standalone solution to improve data quality and master data in Dynamics 365, then Data Quality Studio would be a good fit for your organization.

However, if you are looking at a single offering to manage application integration, master data management, data preparation and exports, workflow creation, and data quality management then you could also consider our Data Governance Solution. If you are interested in more information do download our Data Governance Solution factsheet to understand how you can use our solutions to execute your data governance strategy.

However, if you do not have a data governance strategy and data stewards to manage processes then it would not be wise to make any investments in a data quality solution at the moment.

Although we have helped customers set up data quality processes that were from both technical and business backgrounds, we still recommend drawing out your data governance strategy and set of business rules to be added to the solution.

Doing this in advance, prior to reaching out to our experts, makes it easier for you to understand your business requirements and will also speed up implementation later on. Once you have both of these steps outlined and are ready to consider a data quality solution, do schedule some time with our experts for a demo.