Merit Energy
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 migration partner to support their SAP S/4 implementation. Already familiar with SAP solutions, Merit had also purchased an SAP Master Data Governance (SAP MDG) license with the intent to deploy MDG in multiple business domains. Merit needed a maintainable solution could be easily supported by their internal team post-implementation and to extend MDG’s Business Partner model to support domain-specific data model extensions like SAP’s Production & Revenue Accounting (PRA) module. PRA is a major aspect of Merit’s master data creation and maintenance. 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.
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....they lead the industry in delivery of data migrations, cleansing and transformation, particularly in the area of MDG.”
Implementation Highlights
Syniti’s Advanced Data Migration and Management solution for SAP (ADMM) was implemented to support Merit’s Brownfield data migration to S/4. 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
- Vendor Master Data
- Data Volume Processed: ~20K vendors
- Create, Change, Block, Delete and Mass Process for MDG-V MREV and MJVL Vendors
- Reconciliation reporting for six data objects (Accounts Payable, Receivables, General Ledger, Cost allocations, Customers, and Vendor)
- Auto filled 85% of fields via rule and derivations, reduced the number of keystrokes by 50%
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
Results
Syniti successfully implemented the 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.