Time for your annual spring cleaning?
You know what it’s like. Spring is coming and along with it comes the urge to spring clean the house. Bookshelves need dusting, the oven a good cleaning, windows washing and bathrooms scrubbing. A job most of us put off, since it is so tedious and boring! We see the same behavior in a global customer/supplier database.
Why do we act this way? Why don’t we divide our work more evenly over the year so we can have things neat and tidy year round and avoid the hassle of “the big clean”? We only feel guilty and the effects are short term, a few months at most.
The exact same behavior can be seen in a global customer/supplier database. Dust bunnies twirling all over until it becomes impossible to do a good job and keep track of customers/suppliers. Data quality deteriorates over time and soon it can't even be used for the most basic customer/supplier decisions or analyses. The difference in the above comparison is that this house has never been cleaned, or it’s been six years since it last had a good cleaning.
This is allowed to continue until it affects profitability and growth, when our in-house users loose faith in the system and devise a number of sub-solutions unrelated to the applications and sales support into which the company has invested so much money. The sales/order process takes too long and is not the best, customer/supplier logs are manual, customer/supplier analyses and decision-making documents no longer provide accurate answers but instead generate the wrong decisions. It’s at that point we assemble the sales force for spring cleaning. Or scan the market for tools that can help us purge the system of double entries, bankrupt companies, etc.
There is a better alternative:
Outsource your data quality to D&B!
Gain access to 160 million enterprises worldwide as reference to your own database.
- This will enable you to automate your credit decisions and your customer/supplier log in real time.
- D&B matches your global customers/suppliers with our global database, issues a unique key, corrects errors and structures a homogenous global data standard.
- D&B supplies additional and updated customers/supplier intelligence.
- D&B updates your customers/suppliers at a predetermined frequency, while you maintain your data quality.
All for a fixed annual fee that is easy to budget and follow up. Now you have a good platform on which to make good decisions and analyses, and you’ve created a data standard that users can trust is correct and homogenous. You now have a competitive advantage that you can start using.
So, use your resources correctly and quit spring cleaning!
Christer Wiberg
Business Area Manager, D&B Sverige AB