A leading integrator of IT environments, infrastructure and software offers solutions on virtually every technology platform. To support global operations, this organization depends upon its data residing in multiple databases and in multiple environments. This method of data silos supports individual geographies, but it also creates multiple views of customers, products and other data assets.
The company knew that it had a persistent problem with poor-quality data throughout the enterprise, with numerous duplicate, incomplete or inaccurate customer records in its systems. The company had a particular issue around the customer address data in its systems. As a global company, significant portions of this company’s customer data had been entered into a Siebel CRM application by individuals unfamiliar with local postal standards – or into systems ill-equipped to deal with those standards. As a result, staff faced a persistent problem of incomplete or invalid contact information.
The company’s IT department routinely addressed data quality issues raised by individuals throughout the organization. The individual complaints showed several trends that indicated that a more programmatic approach to data quality could solve the customer data issues that were inhibiting solid customer relationships. The company decided to implement an enterprisewide data quality initiative to cleanse the data and bring it up to company standards.
Seeking a robust solution that would allow data quality routines to manage data within its Siebel environment, the company thoroughly evaluated multiple data quality vendors and selected DataFlux.
DataFlux offers an industry-leading technology platform that encompasses every facet of the data management process. Through its intuitive interface, DataFlux gives business users powerful data improvement capabilities and complete control over data quality, including extensive pre-built standardization libraries.
To address the company’s address standardization requirements, DataFlux provided capabilities to standardize addresses in more than 240 countries. DataFlux address verification solutions are certified for CASS (USA), SERP (Canada), AMAS (Australia) and other postal conventions. Additionally, DataFlux provides full-featured, localized versions of the rules, grammars and phonetics that serve as the foundation for parsing, standardizing and verifying a wide range of international data.
Importantly, DataFlux supported a data quality program that was not a single project but an ongoing data management initiative. Rules created to initially cleanse data became part of the Siebel infrastructure, allowing the system to check for duplicates using non-obvious (or fuzzy) matches between records. The system also checked for postal standards in real time, helping to catch non-standard data before it could cause a problem with customer service and support.
The company saw an immediate improvement in its customer data. Using DataFlux, staff identified and eliminated more than one million duplicate customer records. The improved data quality resulted in increased usefulness of the data across the enterprise – the company standardized address data in accordance with local standards worldwide, severely reducing issues associated with incorrect customer addresses.
Furthermore, the company extended these data quality routines as services throughout the enterprise, allowing users worldwide to benefit from the improved data quality. Data quality became part of the fabric of the IT environment, pushing data standardization and normalization as far upstream as possible. These routines helped the company achieve initial success and will help the company build towards an enterprisewide master data management (MDM) program.