A mid-market specialty manufacturer operated on separate ERP systems at each of its facilities. Local staff lacked rigor in recording customer names. A given customer could be named differently within a factory. Customers could also be served by multiple factories and recorded locally under an entirely different name. Misspellings and typos were not uncommon and compounded the issue. As the business prepared for a company sale event, management struggled to answer a basic question: “Who are your top customers?”
Approach
We set out to connect and cleanse the data with the objective of creating a unified customer view. In addition to the historic ERP records, the data scope was expanded to gain consistency with the active sales funnel and prospect list which used different customer naming conventions. Hence the input data sources were varied and complex.
The data was extracted and transformed through a set of dozens of interdependent queries, predominantly using Power Query. A naming alias mapping table was also used.
Results
Unified Customer Names
- Management now has a clean, unified, consolidated view of its entire customer base.
- In some cases, dozens of different customer names were consolidated into one.
Vendor Data Readiness
- The company is now in a position to easily respond to investor due diligence enquiries regarding its customer base.
- Revenue and profitability metrics by customer are accurate and more meaningful.
Conclusion
Mid-market companies often do not pay adequate attention to the quality of its data. We systematically extracted, cleansed and transformed the data before it could be analyzed to drive insights and better decision-making. Contact us to discuss how we can help you navigate your journey to a data-driven culture.