PITT OHIO EXPRESS is a Pittsburgh, Pa.-based transportation company that handles less-than-truckload shipping throughout the Mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes states. With 22 terminals in its service area, PITT OHIO makes over 9,500 daily deliveries to more than 14,000 unique locations.
On any given day, PITT OHIO processes 9,000 – 11,000 new invoices. Each invoice is entered manually, in a process that has historically given greater precedence to entry speed than to data quality. While understandable from an operational perspective, this rapid-fire data entry approach eventually created a significant duplicate data problem for the company. Each variation in customer name or address information would create an entirely new customer record, meaning that a single entity could be represented by dozens of records in the database system.
PITT OHIO selected DataFlux to complete its customer data integration initiative. The intuitive DataFlux interface allowed PITT OHIO’s business users (those employees whose job performance was tied to the integrity of information) to take responsibility for managing customer data.
DataFlux technology allowed PITT OHIO to discover and address problematic data, and to verify and merge customer records. Business users built data improvement workflows quickly and logically with the innovative job flow builder.
With DataFlux's fuzzy logic matching capabilities, PITT OHIO was able to reconcile customer records, identify duplicates, and reduce these multiple instances into a single master record.
PITT OHIO began the project with a goal of a nine-month implementation schedule. With DataFlux’s flexibility and intuitive interface, deployment and learning time were significantly shorter than scheduled. This project, scheduled for nine months, was completed in just five.
PITT OHIO began the deployment with an expectation of an ongoing 95% data consolidation rate. DataFlux allowed the company to surpass this goal, giving PITT OHIO a consistent 99% consolidation rate.
Before implementing DataFlux, PITT OHIO’s customer data management had been consuming significant amounts of time from the IT department and of multiple business users. After using DataFlux technology to increase the quality of customer data, PITT OHIO was able to manage this information with only a single business user.
PITT OHIO was able to turn its improved database into a competitive advantage. By refining its address information, the company was able to offer its customers more efficient shipping times and more advanced logistics than its competitors. Now, with the new, consolidated view of its customer data, PITT OHIO has been able to provide more targeted service, identify its most valuable customers and deliver competitive value in return.