Should we buy data quality management tools or focus on policies?

Simple arithmetic (well, maybe not so simple): data quality management software should be a reasonable alternative if the financial scope of the negative impacts of your current situation exceeds the cost of a better solution. In other words, if the costs of the time invested in manual extraction, inspection, cleansing/correction and reconciliation when the corrected SAP data is compared to the original captured data is greater than an automated alternative, then the alternative would be preferred. However, also recognize that there are startup costs as well as capital investment/licensing costs for tools, and even once you buy and install them, you need some expertise to make those tools do anything useful. In fact, from a cost perspective the tools approach may even be more expensive.

Here is a different suggestion: Instead of focusing on the tools approach, think about standardizing your data management and data quality policies and procedures, and review how your current processes could be streamlined, both in terms of maintaining the current manual methods and replacing them with new tools. This data governance assessment and standardization may provide a much greater lift in a shorter time frame in terms of data quality and data consistency improvement. Email me and let me know if that works, or if you have more questions.