How Can STAEDEAN’s Solutions Help You Resolve Challenges in the Data Lifecycle?

The amount of data created and consumed the world over is growing at a rapid pace. Statista reports that the total amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed globally reached 64.2 zettabytes in 2020. This means that for organizations to create any value from data and derive meaning, they need to first work on the data in order to publish clean, validated, and accurate data as one source of truth.

If organizations do not have data governance strategies in place, then deriving any value from their data will be difficult. You can expect several data challenges in the data lifecycle process and if you do not have the tools to mitigate those challenges, business intelligence and analytics will be an elusive goal for your organization.

At STAEDEAN, we have built solutions that help organizations with every stage in their data management journey. We offer Data Management Solutions ranging from EDI to Data Governance. So not only do we understand the need to have data management processes to derive meaning from your data, but we can help you navigate this process with ease every step of the way from data creation to business intelligence.

In this article, we outline the challenges between data creation to publishing data in the data lifecycle and share the capabilities of our Data Governance Solution which can help you surpass those stumbling blocks. If you are struggling with challenges post these stages in accessing data quality, deriving value from your data, and maintaining a sustainable analytics solution, then explore our end-to-end Data Analytics Solution.

What are the different stages in the data lifecycle? What are their challenges?

As part of the data lifecycle, there are a few stages that we highlight below and also share the challenges at each stage

Stage 1: Create or import

When you create the data and type it or import it, it might not be complete or validated if there are no data governance strategies and tools implemented. So, the challenges faced are:

• Bad data quality
• Missing and incorrect data in some fields
• Lack of automated ways to check and improve data quality

Step 2: Complete and validate

The next step after the data is created or imported is to check and validate the data. The data stewards need to check if the data is complete and meets all business requirements in the application based on the data governance strategies outlined by the organization. Below are the challenges faced by organizations in this step:

• Manually driven
• Lack of governance and controls
• Time and resource-intensive

Step 3: Publish

After the first two steps, once the data has been approved it can be published and distributed to the organization. Challenges in this step are:

• Manually intensive process
• Data quality concerns as it is published and updated locally

Step 4: Update or import

After a while there might be some request or change, then the data can be updated or imported. And the process begins again with stage 1 of refining the data quality. Challenges faced in this stage are:

• Bad data quality
• Lack of automated ways to check and improve data quality

How can STAEDEAN’s solutions help resolve challenges in the data lifecycle?

During the steps listed above, there are some challenges faced by business users and data stewards. To help them with these challenges we have different offerings under our Data Management Solutions.

How can STAEDEAN resolve challenges in the create or import data stage?

Our Data Governance Solution can help with the import stage. All our Data Management Solutions are built for Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&SCM. Below are some functionalities from our master data management solution that can help resolve challenges in this stage.

• Data quality management helps you add rules with conditions, connect to web services to add external validations, check for duplicates and more.
• Data integration engine helps you with application integration, data migration, and data mapping.
• Master data management helps you manage and distribute your master data within D365 F&SCM and to external system.
• Dynamic field security helps you manage field security at the local and global level in D365 F&SCM.
• Configurable workflows help in creating master data and ensure smooth data entry by guiding users with specific fields that they are responsible for.

Using our solution, you can validate data for example email addresses or product data. And also set up rules to enforce data quality upon creation, import, and legacy data checks by means of configuration and not coding.

For importing the data, you can use the easy-to-use, no-code integration setup with configurable mappings offered by our Data Governance Solution.

For fields that need to be accessible or restricted, you can use the Dynamic field security functionality. The solution allows you to set local or global values or fields for added security depending on the application.

How can STAEDEAN help with challenges in the complete and validate stage?

Again, our master data management solution for Dynamics 365 can help you complete and validate your data in the next stage.

• Configurable workflows help streamline data entry, collaboration, approval, and audit changes.
• Data quality rules helps you set up active rules that are effective on every data set that is updated.
• Dynamic field security has the ability to restrict access to local and global fields to ensure security.

The Data Governance Solution helps you streamline data entry by setting up steps. And each step can be assigned to different persons who can complete the data with a limited set of fields that are required for them to complete.

During the data entry, we must take into account data quality where at the time of completing and validating data, our solution can execute all those rules, and Dynamic field security can be used to restrict and make certain fields available for the users entering the data.

How can STAEDEAN help with challenges in the publishing stage?

Our Data Governance Solution can help you with this challenge. Below we explain how.

• Master data management enables a no-code configurable setup for distributing data across legal entities and external apps.
• Data quality management helps you set up business rules and improve data quality.
• Dynamic field security
  for adding a layer of security in managing your master data.

Once the data has been published, it will be live in a master data management company and our Data Governance Solution can be used to distribute data to local companies and even external applications. There might be an issue where certain data is not complete for local companies for example the text details might not be complete for various disparate applications and then you could use a configured workflow to complete the data. Active data quality rules enforced will ensure that any data entered is validated and accurate.

How can STAEDEAN help with challenges in the update or import stage?

Our Data Governance Solution can help you with this step.

• Data quality management can help you configure data quality rules that are effective on every data update. Besides that, using our solution you can also set up quality assessment rules to check data quality for historical data.
• Dynamic field security will ensure security while you open the data up to assigned business users for updating.
• Integration engine will help you import and synchronize data across applications.
• Configurable workflows can help you update master data when required and the workflow templates support version management. 

Our Data Governance Solution will ensure that when the data needs to be updated, only specific data owners have access to certain fields, and data quality rules ensure that the data changed is validated and accurate.

Interested in our Data Governance Solution?

In this blog, we have presented the full data lifecycle and its challenges. At STAEDEAN, we have built a value chain with our Data Management Solutions that can help you streamline operations, improve data processes, and derive value from your data.

While it is important to be proactive rather than reactive to resolve challenges in your data lifecycle, you need to first understand what those challenges are and if our solutions would be the right fit for your organization.

If you think our configuration-based, no-code Data Governance Solution built for Microsoft Dynamics 365 fits into your data governance strategy, reach out to us for a demo. Our experts can understand your data governance strategy and share their recommendations based on your business requirements. In the meanwhile, we also recommend browsing our solution pages and downloading our Data Governance Solution factsheet.