CIO: “Your customers are doing the integration for you.”
Author: Sanjay Mehta, CEO MAIA Intelligence
Standardizing Data and Reporting in your Enterprise
In today’s scenario critical information needs are much like hitting a moving target—difficult at best. The decision making environment at most companies today is marked by complexity and turbulence.
Let’s take a financial services company where in a customer does a transaction of opening a depository account. The next transaction he does is purchase of a mutual fund, and then does buying and selling of few stocks, then it purchase insurance and so on. In a year this customer is buying multiple services and products from this financial service company. Each of these transactions is being done in a different back office application. In case this customer today asks for a single consolidated transaction of all the possible transaction done with all the line of business from the company then it is unable to provide it. As a customer he will get probably 10 different statements and he will go back and open a spread sheet and integrate this data in one and look at his single view of all the transactions done with this financial services company. If this customer is a family which usually is the case saying that he has taken few insurance policies in name of his children wife. Stocks are traded in his brother and few other family relations. How does the company ensure that these transactions are grouped under one name and ensuring that customer gets a single click report to all transactions at all times. How do I create this master data which is not the transaction data? This Master data should be a set of core data elements of the business that are applied to multiple transactions and that are used to categorize, aggregate, and evaluate the transaction data.
What your customers requires is ability to answers business questions based on the transaction data he has for all the line of business with your company on their own without having to rely on experts or they becoming technology experts by doing integration of the data themselves. They want uninterrupted data access which they can drill up and down and across to analyze the information and create its own reports and layouts to collaborate with others.
While nothing new, the need of single customer master data is brought under attention of corporate because of the limiting effect it is having on organizations today. The businesses spend billions annually trying to rectify data quality problems due to multiple transactional data with multiple customer identities. How many man-years of labor are wasted by companies attempting to manually reconcile transaction data discrepancies with their thousands of customers? How many crore of Rupees are lost annually on post mail marketing campaigns that are incorrectly sent to the same people because duplicate records exist for these customers?
MAIA Intelligence using 1KEY Web BI presentation layer has given the power of slicing and dicing in customer hand to analyze the data they want in their own format. 1KEY BI gives straight advantages in below mentioned points
- 1KEY BI will help to make your unprofitable customers more profitable?
- 1KEY BI will help to retain your profitable customers?
- 1KEY BI will help to win back your lost customers?
- 1KEY BI will help to improve customer satisfaction?
- 1KEY BI will help to increase sales?
- 1KEY BI will help to reduce expenses?
Single Customer Master Data integration offers an improvement in master data correctness, consistency and accessibility that create an opportunity for greater competitive advantage. Given the magnitude of the problem, this is not just a sound investment—it is an essential one.
Posted on March 10th, 2008 by Sanjay Mehta
Filed under: CIO Community, View Points & Perspective
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