Case Studies
GDP were approached by Xerox, a world leader in document management technology and services enterprise, with worldwide revenue income of over 17 billion dollars. They were in the process of migrating a number of ageing legacy systems to a new SAP based ERP environment. Although already utilising an ETL tool to perform the data manipulation, they soon recognised that their data issues necessitated outsourcing the process to a company specialising in international DP.
Working closely with the client, GDP developed a fast turnaround process that was subject to very aggressive KPIs. The migration was staggered, supplied in multiple ‘deltas’ of varying size and consisting of over 20 countries. Each delta was processed and quality assured within an agreed timeframe; this was crucial as the final delta return was scheduled by the minute into the new live environment switch-over.
The initial audit of the data identified problematic data trends; misspelling and truncation of address elements, fragmentation and concatenation of address lines, spurious data entries, missing country names and partial addresses missing vital elements.
Utilising advanced parsing techniques on a country by country basis, address components were identified and separated, populating distinct and comprehensive address element fields. This process employed extensive multi-language vocabularies and country specific address syntax rules. Information that fell outside of this parsing exercise was retained in separate ‘non-address’ fields. It was important that no information was lost, as much of this text was relevant and of operational importance to the client.
The enhanced addresses were then processed through our international address validation software multiple times; those failing verification were reprocessed with differing approaches to maximize the success rate.
The resultant returned files comprised of corrected and enhanced address elements, with standardised casing, corrected diacriticals and country specific mailing output formatting. Only then did they reach the quality of address cleansing and parsing required for the successful operation of the client’s proposed SAP applications.
Following the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe, GDP were tasked to quantify the crossover of customers between the two organisations. The majority of data was web captured, with no real-time address verification. As a result, there was a high percentage of poor quality data; incorrectly keyed, spelt and formatted.
In order for us to achieve a successful outcome, the processing stages – data manipulation, address verification/enhancement and deduplication – required multiple executions with varying parameters. Phases of bespoke coding enabled subsequent address failures to gain an acceptable level of verification. Extensive interrogation of the data was performed to allow the optimum setup of deduplication parameters. Our multi-criteria dedupe capabilities enabled us to identify matches that would not have normally been found using conventional methodology.
The results were backed up and verified by a comprehensive audit process.
