BMC Software, Inc. is a leading provider of enterprise management solutions that empower companies to manage IT from a business perspective. Delivering Business Service Management, BMC Software solutions span enterprise systems, applications, databases and service management.
Like many growing companies, BMC Software has been adding customer information to its primary customer relationship management (CRM) system for years. Although the company was a longtime Siebel customer, data quality was an issue. Different employees added data to the company’s CRM system, often creating non-standard or duplicate records.
The impact of inconsistent, inaccurate and unreliable data directly impacted the sales team’s productivity. If the sales team had poor-quality data in the CRM system, they would not be able to communicate effectively with customers. Additionally, bad data could lead to inaccurate sales forecasts and affect other aspects of new business efforts.
“Put simply, data quality has a dramatic effect on any of our customer-facing initiatives,” says Kelly Williams, data analyst for BMC Software, “We needed a solution capable of codifying our business rules for data quality – and then enforcing those in both batch and real-time environments.”
To meet the growing need for high-quality data, BMC Software began a data quality and data integration program designed to identify and resolve duplicate records (in batch and real-time). The data improvement initiative also concentrated on validating addresses – both primary and secondary addresses – to help build a more unified view of the customer.
BMC Software selected the award-winning DataFlux suite of applications designed to help organizations analyze, improve and control corporate information. The company uses DataFlux to visually design workflows for data quality and data integration rules. DataFlux technology provides an environment to utilize those rules via service oriented architecture (SOA) in real time, allowing the company to find and resolve poor-quality data before it reaches the application.
As BMC expanded its sales efforts, DataFlux provided high-quality data that fueled better outreach to prospects and customers. Now, as new data enters the Siebel application, DataFlux real-time data quality and data integration rules ensure that a new customer or a new account isn’t a duplicate of an existing record. If it is a duplicate, the user has the ability to just append the record of an existing customer.
“With DataFlux, we have the power to look at more than the primary address for matching accounts,” Williams says. “DataFlux was the only vendor that allowed us to use secondary addresses and other details to match duplicates.”
DataFlux technology also gave managers and executives more confidence in sales forecasts and pipeline projections. Now, the list of prospects is more consistent and reliable, leading to a more accurate view of the sales cycle.
“Everyone in sales appreciates a more realistic view of the prospect base,” Williams says. “In that way, adding DataFlux to our CRM efforts has enhanced our ability to meet customer demands – and find ways to grow into new markets.”