How Data Quality as a Service (DQaaS) can boost the value of your most critical asset
It's been called "the oil of the twenty-first century," likened to a new currency, or said to now be worth more than tangible assets like real estate or inventory. But the true value of business data is notoriously difficult to pin down.
Data can be monetized directly, correlated across previously unrelated systems to reveal new insights, or harvested to fuel the advanced analytics that drive improved decision-making. In today’s digitally transforming world, these methods of creating value from information have become fairly commonplace. It’s commonplace, too, for executives to consider the value of their data to be directly linked to its availability and fitness for use in such applications.
Less often do we think of data as a bridge between our organizations’ internal structures and cultures and the world outside the enterprise. And it’s less common for stakeholders to assess their data’s value in accordance with its ability to reflect that outside world accurately and appropriately.
In essence, however, that’s exactly what high quality business partner, customer, and vendor master data will give you - an honest reflection of the geographical, political, and social environment in which you do business.
Data Quality as a Service (DQaaS) = Data Quality + Services
Obtaining and maintaining high-quality data isn’t just a technical problem. Though automated processes in data management can be employed for some data quality improvement tasks, such as finding and removing duplicate entries, or flagging tax ID number or postcode fields containing the incorrect number of digits, these activities are merely the beginning of attaining fully accurate data.
The primary challenge in ensuring that your master data remains true to life is that the external world your data strives to represent is ever-changing. Customers purchase new homes in new cities, change their names, or alter other aspects of their identities daily. They’re born, they die, and they relocate. Constantly.
Business partners and vendors are no more static than members of the public. Commercial entities are formed, merged with others or acquired, and dissolved on a regular basis. They may become subject to sanctions or embargoes, or become insolvent. Or they may change their corporate structures as they grow.
Not only does the outside world exist in a state of ongoing flux, but your technology environment is likely to evolve as aging systems become obsolete, new hardware and software resources become available, and functional requirements change. This, too, adds complexity to the task of keeping your data usable at all times.
When Data Quality is delivered as-a-service, not only can you obtain it via a secure and highly available cloud platform, but you benefit from the assistance of industry experts who devote their time and attention to finding the best data sources and technologies to help you handle the complexity of mapping data to an ever-changing world.
As a fully managed service, DQaaS enables you to avail yourself or a vast pool of resources - ranging from data transparency and cleansing algorithms to public records-based or community-sourced data validation resources - without increasing the demands placed on your team. Because the services are provided on a subscription basis and you pay only for the particular functionalities you need, they’re a cost-effective, flexible, and scalable solution.
Data Quality as a Service example for using existing customer and vendor data. Step 1: search for existing business partner data using the name and country.
DQaaS example for using existing customer and vendor data. Step 2: review and choose one record of existing business partner data from differerent sources.
DQaaS example for using existing customer and vendor data. Step 3: access detailed information including adress, country, post code, geo codes, legal form, VAT registration number
Improved master data quality benefits everyone
Today’s data scientists spend up to 80 percent of their time on non-analytic tasks. They’re doing things like finding, cleaning, and preparing data more often than they’re extracting valuable insights from it. When they devote themselves to these basic and menial tasks in data management, they’re not making the best use of their training and expertise, and their job satisfaction and morale are likely to suffer.
But it’s not only data scientists who will be able to work more efficiently - and generate more value - with high quality data. Sales teams will be able to spend more time nurturing relationships, and less time correcting phone numbers and email addresses. Marketers can ensure that their messages reach more members of their target audiences. Risk management teams can better guard against payment fraud and delinquency. And supply chain managers can ensure that shipments reach the correct destinations.
DQaaS in the real world
Consider, for example, the case of an enterprise-wide migration to SAP S/4HANA. SAP S/4HANA can transform operational processes for improved efficiency, faster and more accurate reporting, and greater overall customer satisfaction and profitability. SAP S/4HANA is a powerful technology, but with that power comes complexity. Most real-world SAP S/4 HANA migration projects end up being slower, more costly, and more difficult than stakeholders initially anticipate. And because ERP solutions are global, migration challenges can impact nearly every aspect of the enterprise.
In particular, poor data quality becomes a significant roadblock in a majority of SAP S/4HANA migration projects. Without clean and high quality master data, it’s nearly impossible to engineer a brownfield migration that will proceed without major disruptions to the business.
Turning to a DQaaS solution such as the CDQ Data Sharing Platform allows you to resolve these issues fully before your migration project’s kickoff. When a quick, easy-to-use, and fully automated process in place to validate, enrich, and cleanse your data in accordance with over 1,000 rules and policies, and to check it against current public data sources, you can have confidence that its quality will be excellent. Not only is this excellence guaranteed at the project’s outset, but it will be sustained over its entire duration.
The benefits of DQaaS aren’t just for data scientists, change management teams, or technology specialists. They impact everyone in the organization. Higher quality vendor and customer master data means that employees will be able to devote more of their working hours to the jobs they were actually hired to do. It essentially ensures they’ll be more productive, while also reducing many of the costs that erroneous data will lead to. It prepares the global enterprise for the digital transformation projects that are a prerequisite to success in the twenty-first century. And it means that everyone will have a better understanding—and a more accurate image—of the communities in which they live and work.
Interested in our data quality services? To learn more about how CDQ’s Data Quality as a Service solutions can help your organization build a better picture of your customers, business partners, vendors, and the worlds they live in, contact us today.
Data Sharing Community
Better quality, less manual effort for data maintenance: Our Data Sharing Community helps companies improve their business partner data with DQaaS services, using a state-of-the-art and secure cloud infrastructure. Share the burden of data maintenance! Get to know the CDQ Data Sharing Community
Switzerland
Germany
