Reducing the Risk of ERP Consolidation starts first and foremost with your Data.This is nothing new; companies with multiple misaligned ERP systems are often putting inordinate risk on their business. It can translate to too much inventory, long lead times, and shipping issues from poorly organized and specified goods. And don’t forget the finance side! When goods are shipped and promises are kept/not kept there’s the issue of accounts. No single chart of counts translates to no accountability.

So – I’ve decided. I need to consolidate!

Well, you can’t consolidate ERP applications [for that matter any of your applications] without first considering your data. This means looking at how your data is being integrated by these ERP systems, how it is being synchronized, what information is being shared, or not being shared. Most importantly, making sure that the data is mastered. What is the best way to do this? In the recent webcast: Reduce ERP consolidation Risks with Oracle Master Data Management we outlined 3 key guidelines:

#1: Consolidate your Product Data

#3: Consolidate your Financial Data

Together these help customers achieve reduced risk, better customer intimacy, reducing inventory levels, elimination of product variations, and finally a single master chart of accounts. In the case of Oracle's customer Zebra Technologies, they were able to consolidate over 140 applications by mastering their data. Ultimately this gave them 60% cost savings for the year on IT spend.

Oracle's enterprise master data management (MDM) can play a big role in ERP consolidation. It includes a set of products that consolidates and maintains complete, accurate, and authoritative master data across the enterprise and distributes this master information to all operational and analytical applications as a shared service.

It’s optimized to work with any application source (not just Oracle’s) and can integrate using technology from Oracle Fusion Middleware (i.e. GoldenGate for data synchronization and real-time replication or ODI with its E-LT optimized bulk data and transformation capability). In addition especially for ERP consolidation use cases it’s important to leverage the AIA and SOA capabilities as part of Fusion Middleware to connect these multiple applications together and relay the data into the correct hub.

Oracle’s MDM strategy is a unique offering in the industry, one that has common elements across the top and bottom in Middleware, BI/DW, Engineered systems combined with Enterprise Data Quality to enable comprehensive Data Governance at all levels. In addition, Oracle MDM provides the best-in-class capabilities to master all variations of data, including customer, supplier, product, financial data. But ultimately at the center of Oracle MDM is your data, making it more trusted, making it secure and accessible as part of a role-based approach, and getting it to make sense to you in any situation, whether it’s a specific ERP process like we talked about or something that is custom to your organization.

To learn more about these techniques in ERP consolidation watch our webcast or goto our Oracle MDM website at www.oracle.com/goto/mdm