360-Degree Customer View with an MDM Solution

One major accomplishment during the first phase of the engagement, was that Adastra`s team built an initial working solution in just 2 months. It was presented to the business users and enabled our customer to identify the benefits at a very early stage, weight the cost/benefits and decide whether the solution would be able to cover their requirements. Such an early demo, instead of just providing design, architecture and mockups, was possible because of the very fast development cycles provided by the MDM platform (Ataccama) and Adastra`s proven track record in delivering MDM solutions.

Our client had to tackle two major challenges:

1. There was no consolidated view of the customers. Multiple source systems had provided customer details from different perspective – assets, orders, products, etc.
2. Client identification during a call was slow and extensive questioning was required. When order was received from a client it appeared that this client had multiple business entities, lots of equipment, as well as hundreds of names associated with previous and current orders. It took significant amount of time to question the person on the call, in order to identify the client.

Therefore, the company started a digital transformation initiative to increase productivity and improve customer experience. They were developing ordering web portal and to ensure successful implementation, they had to implement a master data management solution to master, link, clean, enrich and govern Customer data. They also had to enhance governance and build business processes to keep Customer data clean across all business departments.

The company tried several times to implement a viable MDM solution internally, but the outcomes were not satisfying. Eventually, the company decided to leverage Ataccama MDC as a master data management tool. They relied on Adastra’s proven track record in delivering MDM solutions and entrusted us to guide them in this endeavor.

Adastra leveraged Ataccama MDC 12.2 to build an MDM hub, which included the Customer, Vendor, Individual, Contact, Address, Asset and Order entities, with their relationships and hierarchies. Ataccama MDA was configured to visualize the data in the hub. Ataccama DQIT was supporting the exception management processes. A Party model was built to provide the data for each Customer, as well as its contacts, addresses, assets and orders.

Phase 1

The objective of the first phase was to lay out the foundations and:

• Develop an MDM solution to master customer data from 3 source systems, 1 file extract and reference data.
• Ensure that the Order Desk Portal has access to clean and governed customer data.

The team worked with client’s technical and business team to gather requirements, create the data quality and business rules. A Party master model was created, leveraging the Data Warehouse model. Standardized batch load interface was built along with processes allowing load if any frequency. Automated cleansing, standardization, enrichment, and matching rules were established. A standardized request/response API interface for downstream consumption was configured.

A standardized web-based search and view interface was provided for end users and data stewards – Ataccama MDA and DQIT. The data covered Customer, Location, Asset, Individual and Contact entities and the relationships between them. Over 200 critical data elements were loaded into the Master data hub. There were no major challenges, except that for some entities there was no clear business knowledge.

Phase 2

The objective of the second phase was to enhance phase 1 with more attributes and additional relationships, extend the model with the Vendor entity and add additional source system. To provide the latest functionality to the client, an upgrade of Ataccama to v12.3 was included as well.  

A new relationship between Individual and Address entities was established. Additional source systems were introduced to enhance the addresses and the assets. A lot of potential duplicates, invalid records and unexpected differences were flagged visually to provide better user experience in the web UI. Ataccama DQ Issue Tracker was enabled in its full functionality. In total, over 240 critical data elements were loaded into the Master data hub.

The MDM Hub enabled a 360-degree Customer/Vendor view. It empowered our client to search faster through their consolidated data and browse from Customer`s or Vendor`s attributes and relations. A fast, flexible and modern Web UIs were provided for the Data Analyst and Stewards to speed up their daily tasks.

• Consolidated Customer/Vendor data from several source systems
• 360-degree Customer/Vendor view
• Web UI to search and browse through master data
• Web UI to resolve DQ/business rules issues
• Web UI to manually edit, match and merge master data
• Ability to identify client 5 to 10 times faster