Article

March 2024



Effective data entry

Garbage in - Garbage out is a cliche about ERP systems. But very few companies consciously take care of their data entry quality. Here are some of the best practices for Data entry management.

Drop down data - setting the masters right

Every form has master based dropdown menus. Wherever possible, OurSys comes with pre-filled options to give the users some idea. The concerned department must verify whether these options are right for their company and alter the options if required.

Most of the Management Information System (MIS) reports are analysed based on these options.

If these masters are not filled correctly, the reports will not give you the intended benefit.

Example: Reason for rejection master which is used in daily production.

Filling the forms completely

OurSys mandates filling of certain key fields. But the other fields are also important and can give additional perspectives to your data.

Some users are not aware of the importance of filling the form completely. All they want is a successful submission of the form.

It is important to check user wise data entry trends and train the users if required.

Quality of data entry

When we force filling of fields, many users put incorrect data or meaningless data such as β€˜NA’ or β€˜-β€˜. Some users just put in the first option that shows up in the dropdown.

Every form has to be correctly entered. Wherever required, comments and remarks in detail should also be entered.

Quality of data entry is even more important than completing the data entry.

Timely data entry

Every company must build a culture of putting in data in real time. There are intelligent routines built in OurSys which will misfire if data is entered late.

Also key figures like inventory and pending orders will go wrong. MRP cannot be run on incorrect inventories and open documents.

Thus it should be mandatory to enter data in real time. The likelihood of the data being authentic also goes up if it is entered in real time.

Using reports & MIS for decision support

The best way to ensure that the data is correctly and completely entered is to have managers use the dashboards and reports frequently for decision making. If the data entry is incomplete or incorrect these dashboards and reports would show absurd figures.

Managers are expected to demand correctness and thus install the culture of taking data entry seriously.

Everyone agrees that Data is the new oil and thus your source of unlimited wealth, especially in the era of Artificial Intelligence. But very few are aware of the hygiene required in data entry. We hope this article will raise the awareness and OurSys users can then reap the full benefits of using OurSys ERP.

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