Syniti’s Data Quality Powers Merit Energy’s Digital Transformation
Data Migration Drives Data Quality & Master Data Governance for Merit Energy
The company
Merit Energy Company, LLC (“Merit”) is one of the largest privately held US-based oil and gas companies by production volume. For more than 30 years, Merit has remained one of the largest private oil and gas operators in the United States and has served as a direct energy investment for pension plans, hospitals, endowments, family offices, and foundations.
Project Background
Merit was looking for a data partner to deliver trusted, accurate and high-quality data during their SAP S/4HANA implementation. Merit needed a solution that could easily support and maintain their data post-implementation.
Merit also needed a partner familiar with SAP Master Data Governance (SAP MDG) Business Partner model to support domain-specific data model extensions like SAP’s Production & Revenue Accounting (PRA) module. A major aspect of Merit’s master data creation and maintenance, PRA Data is not supported by the standard out of box MDG data model. In the end, the module had to be entirely customized – an unexpected challenge not accounted for in the initial project scope.
“The system has really enforced data quality and has alleviated a lot of manual entry for our business users… It has also surfaced additional data cleanup areas we need to focus on.”
Implementation Highlights
The SAP Advanced Data Migration and Management by Syniti solution for (SAP ADMM) was implemented to support Merit’s Brownfield data migration to S/4HANA. Syniti Rapid Data Governance (RDG) was also deployed to facilitate the data model extension for the PRA module.
“[RDG] enabled the Syniti resources to deliver on time and budget,” noted Clayton Brown at Merit Energy. The assistance of Syniti’s team of data experts also helped enable internal processes and bring team members up to speed on how to maintain the system ongoing.
“The training was fairly intuitive,” remarked Brown. “Syniti was adaptable to our project delivery approach and patient with our process,” said Brown. “In addition, certain resources spent a good amount of time with us going above and beyond on some critical issues. Syniti resources were onboarded relatively quickly.”
Syniti has proven to be a successful delivery provider for us in particular with the data management aspect and within the project. Should we have another delivery, we most likely will use Syniti.
Key Highlights
- Delivered cleaner, trusted Vendor Master Data – Volume Processed: ~20K vendors
- Create, Change, Block, Delete and Mass Process for MDG-V MREV and MJVL Vendors
- Improved reconciliation reporting for multiple data objects (Accounts Payable, Receivables, General Ledger, Cost allocations, Customers, and Vendor)
- Automated rules and derivations populated 85% of fields, dramatically reducing manual entry by 50% and improving accuracy
The project delivery was key, and the willingness to come onsite during Covid helped bridge the gap with business users. Delivering on time and budget and also having quick responses to production issues has been key in our success.”
Why Syniti was Selected
Prior to working with Syniti, Merit did not have a master data governance solution in place; only SAP with minimum custom validations for certain aspects of data creation. The combination of SAP ADMM and Merit’s SAP MDG license, however, paved the way for Syniti’s RDG solution to support Merit’s data quality and data governance needs before and after the migration go-live.
“Syniti has proven to be a successful delivery provider for us in particular with the data management aspect and within the project. Should we have another delivery, we most likely will use Syniti,” stated Brown. “I would [recommend Syniti], I think they lead the industry in delivery of data migrations, cleansing and transformation particularly in the area of MDG but also in other areas,” Brown concluded.
Results
Syniti successfully implemented the SAP ADMM solution on-time and on-budget, creating and configuring archiving reconciliation reports for six data objects, Accounts Payable, Receivables, General Ledger, Cost allocations, Customers (production, revenue, accounting), and Vendors (production, revenue, accounting). The team was able to use these reconciliation reports for archiving review and evaluation, helping Merit on their data governance journey by providing more visibility into data errors.
“The project delivery was key, and the willingness to come onsite during Covid helped bridge the gap with business users,” said Brown. “Delivering on time and budget and also having quick responses to production issues has been key in our success,” he added.
Syniti was integral to creating enhancements to the SAP MDG solution, enabling Merit to derive even greater use and value out of the SAP product. For example, the ability to customize business rules allowed Merit to put in place the data quality controls needed to mitigate operational risk and improve internal audit controls.
“The system has really enforced data quality and has alleviated a lot of manual entry for our business users… It has also surfaced additional data cleanup areas we need to focus on,” said Brown.