Benefits

Through the application of our services and the implementation of specific solutions, organisations stand to gain numerous benefits.

• An accurate data/information quality status baseline, so that
  • the current position is truly understood
  • decisions will no longer be based on perceptions
  • initiatives can be considered in light of the facts

• Properly defined and agreed targets and requirements, so that
  • Future requirements are clearly articulated
  • Interventions are planned based on the actual gap between the current reality and the future requirements
  • A cost benefit analysis exercise can be conducted for the initiatives planned if the baseline exists and the targets are clear

• Understanding the costs of the current quality status vs. the benefits of the potential position
  • With an accurate baseline in place the costs of the existing data/information quality problems can be ascertained in the context of the current operations. These costs are often unknown or underestimated prior to accurate measurement being completed
  • The potential benefits that can be achieved through reduced rework/wastage can also be determined
  • The cost of the potential initiative can be weighed up against the cost of the existing problems, the lost opportunities, benefits to be gained etc, so that an informed decision can be made regarding the value of a data/information quality intervention

• Improved efficacy and lower operating costs
  • The data/information problems that do exist are often considered only in light of the BI/decision making process, however they usually are having a significant impact on operations as well
  • Productivity improves if information is known to be accurate and up-to-date
  • Rework is reduced as people no longer repeat activities due to data/information errors
  • Scrap is reduced as people no longer create and maintain their own, duplicated versions of information because they do not trust the shared source.
  • Implementing quality improvements will reduce costs and improve productivity for both decisions-makers and operational personnel

• Greater business agility and more opportunities
  Many organizations want to improve their flexibility or reduce costs by integrating technology, systems, process etc. with initiatives like
  • MDM,
  • SOA,
  • ERP’s, etc
  Completing these initiatives successfully should provide many new opportunities and benefits to organisations. However these initiatives will be in jeopardy if the underlying data used is not at an acceptable quality level

• Reduced risk and improved compliance reporting
  • The risks associated with the I/DQ problems are often not clearly understood. Quantifying the extent of the data issues will enable these risks to be properly managed.
  • Improving data/information quality will significantly reduce the risk profile of most organizations
  • The accuracy of compliance reporting, especially as the requirements increase, is often compromised by known/unknown information quality problems. Addressing quality issues will improve the accuracy of the information reporting.

• Improved business intelligence and ROI on data warehouses
  • Most organizations have spent money on warehouses and business intelligence processes that are often compromised by poor quality information
  • Improving the quality of the data fed into these processes and databases will improve the benefit the organisation can derive from these functions
  • Improving the quality of the data at source is an even better approach as it will improve the operating efficacy and the decision making functions

• Improved Marketing and Sales effectiveness Numerous opportunities are available to organisations wanting to improve their marketing and sales activities e.g.
  • CRM,
  • Single view of customer,
  • Customer Segmentation
  • Campaign Management
  • etc
  As with other major initiatives based on information, these opportunities have a dependency on the quality of information at their disposal. Successfully addressing the information quality and implementing improved customer management capabilities enables organisations to reap much greater benefits from their marketing and sales activities.

• Enterprise Management opportunities As organisations understand the costs, benefits, risks and requirements associated with data/information quality, many of them are looking to introduce improved, enterprise-wide initiatives, e.g.
  • Supply Chain Management
  • Corporate Governance and auditable processes
  • Enterprise Data/Information Models
  • Glossary of Terms, Definition Books.
  Successfully introducing these best practices will significantly improve the operating efficiency across the organisation and result in organisation-wide benefits.

It is no secret that the reporting requirements for B-BBEE in South Africa demand accurate and timely information, if the benefits of BEE are ever to be fully realized. All businesses in SA, in one way or another, are required to comply with BEE codes of good practice, and the incentives and penalties are clear, particularly in the area of preferential procurement. This code promotes BEE compliance by ALL entities, encouraging transformation throughout the entire economy. Those organizations that maintain accurate and reliable information on their suppliers and potential suppliers in order to track progress to targets and to receive enhanced recognition when due, will stay ahead of their competitors and become more sought after suppliers themselves. InfoBlueprint, through its Data Management and Information Quality Services, will help you ensure that your supplier information is always accurate, reliable and up to date, helping you prove your compliance and to be a trusted and admired South African company.

Benefits of InfoBlueprint services to Business Intelligence

It is by now well known that BI is a top priority for most organizations, and it has become equally well known that dirty data leads to questionable decisions - the need for higher quality has been driven by frequent frustrations of inaccurate, ambiguous and generally mistrusted information. Traditionally the data quality problem in BI has been tackled by cleansing the data before it is loaded into the BI system, often using Extract Transform and Load (ETL) software. However, this is simply a reactive approach that does nothing more than institutionalize ongoing corrective action, as it never tackles the root causes of dirty data.

The ever increasing volumes of data that have to be processed by BI systems, compounded by the growing need for “real time” BI, means that your BI infrastructure is unlikely to be able to cope with cleansing a company’s data on a regular basis, (and often it cleans the same data every day!) – unless costly upgrades to hardware and technology are regularly applied.

Logically, the correct way to tackle the problem of dirty data is to address the root cause issues that cause it to go bad in the first place! Let InfoBlueprint assist you in ensuring that your investments in BI live up to your expectations, through our proven data quality improvement service.

Please also take a look at our BI Audit service

Benefits of InfoBlueprint Services to Governance and Regulatory Compliance

Corporate Governance
Corporate Governance is the process that validates that we are doing our work according to pre-determined standards. When this work involves data or information derived from data, (as it almost always does), we need to ensure that the right data has been/is being created, stored and processed correctly, and that any information derived from our data is clear, unambiguous, correctly distributed and represents what we say it represents. Clearly, successful Governance requires that we carefully manage our data and information resources and this is exactly the area where InfoBlueprint Quality Management services can deliver benefits and add value.

Regulatory Compliance
Perhaps one of the biggest sticks in the world of business recently has been the substantially increased regulatory compliance requirements. There is nothing more effective than the threat of hefty penalties and/or a stint in jail to get resources mobilized. Whilst many organisations have yet to make the connection between data quality and compliance, those that have done so have ensured that they not only meet compliance requirements, but have also created a much more efficient organization, resulting from all the attendant benefits of high quality data.

Banks, in particular, have had to invest heavily in Basel II initiatives, whilst ensuring that data being used to assess risk is also completely trusted.

Others might soon need to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), Anti Money Laundering (AML), FICA and RICA, all of which need to be underpinned by high quality, trusted data.

InfoBlueprint’s range of Services will help you ensure Governance and Compliance in your business.

Benefits of InfoBlueprint services for CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has long been sought to enable more effective customer interaction and related processes. Unfortunately, despite millions being invested in technology to build CRM systems, little regard has been given to the lifeblood of these platforms – customer information itself.

The benefits of CRM systems can only be realized on a sound foundation of trusted, clean and non-duplicated customer data, and so the issue of customer data quality is paramount to ensuring CRM success. The issues at hand here are the same as those for CDI or Single-View initiatives, and InfoBlueprint’s Services can assist your organisation in achieving CRM success through aligning customer data to the demands of a properly implemented and applied CRM system.

Benefits of InfoBlueprint services for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

SOA is being touted as the next great evolutionary step in the ongoing attempts to align IT with business. It holds great promise for those who get it right, and for those who realize that it is less technology than it is an architectural approach, with the recognition that business functions as services provide the backbone for IT implementation.

At the heart of any organisation is corporate data, and this data is typically stored in multiple disparate systems across the enterprise, and maintained by multiple departments. One of the chief goals of SOA is to allow seamless interaction between multiple systems and departments, regardless of implementation, as business functions are provided by SOA enabled services. This presumes that either the data is totally aligned between these multiple systems, or that alignment will occur in interfaces at some point. Typically, neither is reality, meaning that SOA’s chances of success will be threatened.

A prerequisite, therefore, for a meaningful and successful SOA initiative, is synchronized, clearly defined and clean data. Metadata management plays a key role in SOA, as does high quality data. InfoBlueprint’s range of Services will help you ensure that your data is fit enough to support the promise of SOA in your organisation.

Benefits of InfoBlueprint services for Data Integration

Today’s organisations have data spread across the enterprise, in multiple systems and often in multiple, disparate formats. As companies struggle to achieve a “single view” of reference data, and as new business demands increasingly result in data between different systems having to be regularly shared, the requirement for robust data integration (DI) is becoming critical. There are many integration technologies and tools available, such as:

· Extract Transform & Load (ETL)
· Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)
· Enterprise Information Integration (EII)
· Replication
· SOA and SOA Data Services

Many companies have deployed ETL software to feed their Data Warehouses, but increasingly ETL tools are being used to integrate data operationally on a daily basis. The introduction of MDM “data hubs” is yet another approach to achieving efficiency within information value chains, and these potentially fragmented approaches mean that the need for sound Enterprise Information and Data Architecture has become mandatory.

Importantly, however, any form or hybrid of data integration is only as good as the data being integrated, and so the quality of data in the various systems is critical to successful DI.

InfoBlueprint can assist organisations in designing and building robust data architectures based on best of breed DI technologies, but what makes us different is that we understand and cater for the important need for aligned data across the enterprise. Our robust data quality improvement methodology and solutions should be applied within any DI initiative, ensuring optimal integration according to business needs.

Benefits of InfoBlueprint services for Data Migration

When implementing a new application, one of the aspects often underestimated is the task of populating the new application with the current data. Traditionally, data has simply been “mapped then moved”, only to cause significant problems in the new environment because the quality level of the data is too low to support enhanced functionality. A recent trend has been to profile and cleanse data within legacy systems, before moving it to, for example, a new ERP or CRM package. Better to thoroughly clean, consolidate and enhance data before trying to shoe-horn it into its new home, and so data profiling, standardization and matching has become common practice as sub-projects of new system implementations.

If insufficient attention is paid to managing the legacy data quality before attempting to load it into the new environment, delays and incorrect conversions will inevitable occur.
In the worst case, data may be incorrectly migrated (due to migration project time or resource constraints), and the resulting incorrect data may remain undetected in the new environment for a long time. When the data migration errors finally surface, it may no longer be possible to access the original data.

The new application or environment is compromised and may, in fact, contain data of a lower quality than the environment from which it was migrated, (with the added complication of being unable to recover!)

InfoBlueprint understands the data cleansing and migration processes like no other, and can help you to ensure success of your new system implementation, through its Data Quality Assessment and Data Quality Improvement services.

Benefits of InfoBlueprint services for Single View of Customer

For years organisations have been attempting to achieve a “single view” of their customers, and to shift from an account-centric business model to a customer-centric one. Otherwise known as Customer Data Integration (CDI), a subset of MDM, the benefits of this are clear, as a 360° view of your customer opens up dramatic new opportunities and enhances your customers’ relationship with your organisation.

Like MDM, single-view initiatives demand, as a pre-requisite, cleansed, de-duplicated customer data, sophisticated record linkage and party identification methods and processes to sustain trustworthy data. To achieve this requires a combination of skills, proven processes and technology, and InfoBlueprint is well placed to assist you in your goals around single-view projects, through our Services and depth of experience in this area.

Benefits of InfoBlueprint services for Supply Chain Management

With every flow of goods or services, there is a corresponding and supporting flow of information, and the flow of goods can be seriously disrupted if the associated information is incorrect. In the retail and manufacturing sector, for example, inaccurate information is a killer for supply chain efficiencies, and the knock-on effects, such as “out of stock” situations, can be very costly to all parties, particularly those in the FMCG space. Other problems caused are, for example, inaccurate plan-o-grams, disrupted distribution centre or warehouse operations, invoice reconciliation issues and negatively impacted speed-to-market. However, the most damaging effects are those that affect the end-consumer, as customer loyalty can be seriously eroded if such problems persist over even relatively short periods of time.

Increasingly, Product Information Master (PIM) systems are implemented in an attempt to address these problems, and to ensure that all trading partners use aligned product data – but such systems can only succeed if they are supported by sustained high quality data. Indeed, accurate data is foundational and a pre-requisite for Internal Data Alignment (IDA) and Global Data Synchronisation (GDS). One example of industry collaboration is PDC.za, the South African Product Data Catalogue managed by the Consumer Goods Council of SA (CGCSA). However, PDC.za will only be as good as the data supporting it, and so concerted data quality efforts are necessary by all contributing parties, particularly with regard to Internal Data Alignment.

Bottom line: poor data integrity or inconsistent data causes defects in the value chain and is a momentum killer for Data Alignment, RFID, Synchronization and Collaboration.

Please contact InfoBlueprint for an informal, no-obligation discussion regarding your requirements - we can help build a sustainable IDA and Data Quality solution for you.

Benefits of InfoBlueprint services for Risk Management

Risk Management needs to be practiced in several ways.

- In the sense of ‘Governance’, to ensure that the correct information is presented to internal and external regulatory authorities;

- In the sense of ‘Financial Risk Management’, where the risks associated with insurance or a similar financial transaction need to be correctly calculated and understood;

- In the sense of ‘Business Intelligence’ where the correct information has to available for effective Decision Making.

In all these applications of ‘Risk Management’ the reliability (or ‘value’, or ‘quality’) of the underlying data used in assessing the risk is absolutely paramount to a correct determination and interpretation of the risk. If the data used in these calculations is of a low (or unknown) quality, the whole Risk Management process is unreliable and risk exposure will be incorrectly indicated. All decisions will be ‘risky’, and the size of the risk will be unknown. In fact, the quality of the data used in Risk Management is itself the biggest risk and needs to be properly managed, and you can’t manage anything unless you measure it. By constantly measuring Data Quality in an objective, rather than subjective way, you will uncover any inconsistency, incompleteness, ambiguity and similar data quality issues as soon as possible after they have occurred, and hopefully before the associated risk has been calculated and the wrong decisions have been taken. The investment in Data Quality Management repays itself over and over again in all applications that use data, through cost and rework savings, more reliable Risk Management and greater confidence in information derived from data.

Benefits of InfoBlueprint services for Performance Management

Performance Management is all about interpreting the outcome of ‘events’ by comparing them with an expected or targeted outcome. Perhaps the most obvious example in the business world is Business Intelligence (B.I.). In this process data is gathered and presented in Performance Reports that typically measure Key Perfomance Indicators (KPI’s). If the data gathered to measure performance is not being objectively ‘quality-managed’, then its reliability is unknown. In most cases, the Performance Indicator is a composite number that is the result of many calculations involving several data items. Let us take as an example, a KPI consisting of 5 basic data items and 4 calculation steps. If each data item is 90% reliable, the resulting indicator for this KPI will be less than 60% reliable (assuming that the calculation steps add no further margin of unreliability). In practice, most KPI’s are calculated on many more individually stored data items which undergo several calculations, (aggregations, summarisations, divisions, multiplications, roundings etc…), so any data quality issues present in the original data will be greatly magnified and the result will be at best misleading, and at worst downright dangerous!