
What really went wrong with Target Canada - stygiansonic
http://www.marketingmag.ca/?p=166300&preview=true
======
stygiansonic
Some interesting points about how manual the data-entry in SAP was:

" _The investigative team estimated information in the system was accurate
about 30% of the time. In the U.S., it’s between 98% and 99%....

Thus, “data week” was held in the fall of 2012. Merchandisers essentially had
to confirm every data point for every product with their vendors. A buyer
might have 1,500 products and 50 to 80 fields to check for each one. The more
experienced employees had the foresight to keep records of verified
information (dubbed “sources of truth”), which made the task a little easier.
Others weren’t so lucky. Complicating matters was the dummy information
entered into the system when SAP was set up. That dummy data was still there,
confusing the system, and it had to be expunged. “We actually sat there and
went through every line of data manually,” says a former employee...

There was an entirely different process to ensure the correct data actually
made it into SAP. The employees in Mississauga couldn’t do so directly.
Instead, the information was sent to a Target office in India, where staff
would load it into SAP. Extra contractors had to be hired in India, too.
“Sometimes even when we had the data correct, it got mixed up by the
contractors in Target India,” says a former employee. (Another former employee
disputes this: “Sometimes the quality of their work wasn’t so great, but for
the most part they did a good job.”)_"

