Zag is committed to improving the automotive retail experience by providing transparency throughout the car buying process. Zag offers its affinity partners and their members a guaranteed upfront price with information on how that price compares to what others have paid for the same car, and offers its certified dealers a steady stream of qualified buyers and incremental sales volume. Through its alliances with affinity partners, Zag provides buyers a trusted interaction, a guaranteed upfront price and a fair deal.
Zag’s entire business model relies on accurate data. Zag provides a clearinghouse that allows buyers to find a specific vehicle and a list of dealers who can provide that vehicle. For these transactions to take place, all the parties involved need access to accurate and reliable information.
In managing this data, Zag faced a problem. The inventory data on which Zag relied originated from multiple, unrelated sources. Though all the data was of a similar nature, there was no standardization, no agreed formats and no uniformity between the data sources. For Zag, each new import of inventory data meant a significant and gaining efficiencies and unique development effort to transform the source data to conform to Zag’s internal standards.
Zag found that it was spending a considerable amount of time standardizing inventory data before it was useable. The company saw that having the data rationalized and standardized before it entered its systems would mean a marked improvement in efficiency. To help it achieve this efficiency, the company turned to DataFlux.
The company selected DataFlux to standardize the incoming inventory data. The award-winning, intuitive DataFlux user interface allows business users to drive improvements to data. With DataFlux technology, business users at Zag were able to easily transform the incoming inventory data to conform to Zag’s standards. Once Zag’s standards were created, DataFlux technology automatically detected the nature of the incoming data and applied the correct formatting. “Our business users have found DataFlux very user-friendly and requires no technical background. It’s easy to figure out and amazingly easy to use,” says Michael Gibson, vice president of engineering at Zag. ”Plus there were very few demands on the technical team to support it.”
With DataFlux technology in place, all incoming inventory data was correctly formatted and rationalized to Zag’s standards.
Zag was able to measurably reduce the development efforts that had been previously associated with incoming inventory files. This represented a significant gain in efficiency, eliminating the requirement to have an IT resource regularly dedicated to solving what was actually a business problem.
“Our entire experience with DataFlux has been very positive,” says Gibson, “The installation was easy, the technical support has been excellent, and we really like the fact that the software is so user friendly.”