An independently-owned healthcare device provider develops, manufactures and markets healthcare products that are sold by health care suppliers, retailers and distributors throughout the world. A global company with operations in nearly 100 countries, the company is a renowned provider of specialty healthcare devices – and its global reach means that data management is also a global concern.
The company ships many of its products directly to customers and maintains a sizeable customer relationship management (CRM) system to handle these orders. Employees manually enter hundreds of new entries into this system daily and, over the years, an inability to match new and existing records created a significant amount of duplicate data. These records had to be manually cleansed for duplicates before each mailing campaign, representing a significant investment of time and effort.
Furthermore, because the system relied on manual entry, the overall quality of its address data was poor. The company lost tens of thousands of dollars per year in returned shipping costs due to incorrect or incomplete address information. The opportunity cost of the wrong marketing message reaching the wrong recipient provided an even greater barrier for the company’s sales efforts.
Seeking to eliminate these problems, the company evaluated several solutions, searching for a powerful and scalable data standardization and address verification solution that would integrate with its existing systems. Because both line-of-business and IT staff would work on the project, the company also needed an intuitive tool to design, develop and maintain rules to address duplicate or non-standard data.
The company chose DataFlux technology to analyze the data within its CRM system, weeding out duplicates and verifying address information. After this initial effort, the company would transfer into a monitoring mode, providing ongoing control over new data entering the system.
DataFlux gives business users control over complex data quality initiatives, allowing them to translate their knowledge directly into business rules to manage enterprise data, all from a single, easy-to-use interface. Business and IT staff could work on the program jointly; business users analyzed the data and created the data management requirements through graphically designed business rules, while IT staff would optimize and install these rules within the IT infrastructure.
DataFlux technology allowed the company to address data quality issues within the CRM system, ultimately eliminating over 10,000 duplicate mailing records. Furthermore, this manufacturer now uses DataFlux to verify that new customer details are unique as they enter its databases, preventing duplicates from reaching core business systems. With new entries entering the system daily, this preventative measure translated into a significant reduction in the time required to fix data quality problems before customer communications.
One of the largest benefits to the company has been eliminating the need to de-duplicate customer records for targeted marketing campaigns and to support other customer-facing support initiatives. With as many as 200 campaigns a year, adding address verification to its processes helped the company optimize personnel resources and reduce marketing costs.