The Challenge
One of the nation's leading transportation suppliers faced the challenge of creating a single view of a customer and their interactions within the enterprise. Having no “single point of truth” view on customer data proved it extremely difficult to identify a customer across systems. Duplicate or inaccurate customer data in departmental systems often required employees to perform manual updates to their own local system.
As its customer master database, the company used a hierarchical Information Management System (IMS) that was integrated with other legacy way billing, accounts receivable and transportation system databases. The database contained over 100,000 freight revenue customers with more than 300,000 addresses. The fragmentation of customer data across disparate systems prevented the company from having a single, 360-degree view of the customer.
To address these challenges, the company needed a solution that would aggregate, consolidate, match, cleanse and optimize this customer data, make it visible through a set of services throughout the entire organization, as well as avoid duplication and maintain control over this customer information.
The Solution
To address these challenges, Zanett employed the concept of Master Data Management [MDM] – a group of organizationally accepted methods and tools that are used to manage and optimize customer information used by a number of entities within an organization. Technologies that consolidate, clean, and augment customer data, and synchronize it with all applications, business processes, and analytical tools within an organization, can result in significant improvements in operational efficiency, reporting, and decision-making.
To support the MDM strategy, Zanett implemented the Customer Data Hub module within the company’s existing Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) application. Instead of requiring the company to “rip and replace” legacy investments, deploying the Customer Data functionality allowed them to maximize their return on investment in legacy systems by consolidating customer data from heterogeneous systems into a central location and establishing enterprise-wide data quality and integrity at the lowest possible cost.
The Zanett project team worked with the client’s technical team and a core user group to draw up a detailed project scope, which was used as a guiding document throughout the implementation. Zanett worked with the company to define the technical and functional requirements of moving data maintenance to EBS, and keeping the legacy database running in a read-only mode (so it could continue feeding approximately 40 other systems downstream). The team mapped out nearly 250 various custom attributes that existed in the legacy database and leveraged Customer Data Hub’s standard features to map them to EBS. The team also developed better customer naming standards, best practices for customer entry and maintenance, better security and also implemented complex business rules through the use of custom code.
The Oracle Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Suite was used to maintain a near-live link between EBS and IMS, whereby an update made in EBS flowed down to IMS (and other downstream databases) in approximately one minute. This link enabled downstream billing systems to transition seamlessly to receiving data from EBS.
Using Oracle defined APIs and custom code, customer data was loaded into EBS, and the Customer Data Hub search functionality was modified to include IMS-specific attributes to enable users to search for customer information based on custom attributes.
Zanett was able to leverage the native Customer Relationships feature in EBS to build customer hierarchies based on an external reference file. These enhancements helped the client in performing customer revenue roll-ups and clearly identifying their top-500 customers (enabling Sales and Marketing to further extend their focus and concentrate on increasing revenue).
Using the Oracle User Productivity Kit (UPK), the Zanett team was able to develop quality training materials for multiple sets of users. Deploying UPK as a hyperlink in the Customer Data Hub tool meant easy access to on-demand training without calling the help desk.
The Results
Through its detailed and results-oriented methodology, Zanett helped the company achieve a complete and accurate view of their customers and centralize customer data across their enterprise into a master repository. By extending existing systems, the company was able to leverage legacy platform investments while capitalizing on the benefits of a single customer identity.
Through a Master Data Management strategy and implementing the Customer Data Hub functionality, Zanett has enabled the company to:
- Improve customer data quality by 65%
- Successfully de-duplicate approximately 15,000 customers in a large [>100,000 customers, >400,000 customer locations] database
- Streamline business processes by eliminating manual work caused by poor quality data
- Gain a single enterprise-wide 360-degree view of the customer, allowing for more targeted, differentiated customer service and sales/marketing efforts
