GREAT TOOL CAN BE EVEN BETTER WITH AUTOMATED DATA SOURCING AND CLEANSING
Our client, a well-known hospitality consulting firm, is in the business of helping its customers to optimize revenue, identify incremental sales opportunities and improve guest experience. In order to do that, they use their proprietary tool to analyze data and derive insightful analytics aimed at driving revenue and increasing customer loyalty.
The firm’s proprietary tool produces analytics of high value to their customers. However, this was achieved at a high cost to the consulting firm. The input data coming from their customers is voluminous, highly unorganized and varies greatly from system to system used by their customers. The process of preparing data for ingestion into the tool was highly manual and required a work force of over 300 staff members.
A CLOSER LOOK AT THE ISSUE AT HAND
We set to work to help our client to make the data sourcing and ingestion process faster and more efficient. Here is how the process looked like at that time:
- Multiple sources: multiple customer systems, such as property management systems, sending unorganized data.
- Disparate data: the formats of the data sets generated from different systems following different standards, sequence and so on.
- Extensive manipulation of data prior to ingestion: substantial manipulation of data is required to bring it to the format compatible with the proprietary tool. Each system requires a unique set of actions, often times calling for an additional layer of decoding steps.
- Highly manual process: the process of preparing the data for ingestion was done manually with the use of Excel. Thus, increasing the risk of mistakes potentially leading to incorrect insights provided to their customers.
- Large workforce: the process engaged over 300 people. Maintaining such large workforce for the mundane processing can lead to higher attrition, higher training expenses and, again, makes the process prone to errors.
FAREWELL EXCEL – WELCOME SMARTJOIN
HEXANIKA used its SmartJoin (Data Management platform) with its flexible proprietary Rules Engine to create a set of rules allowing to fully automate the process of data sourcing and standardization. We automated and enriched the data management as follows:
- Automation: created rules to automate and streamline data sourcing and cleansing, eliminating the use of Excel.
- Efficiency: the rules created within SmartJoin can be reused, resulting in faster onboarding of new systems or changes in data sets within the existing systems.
- Accuracy: the rules-based processing flags data not fitting the defined rule sets for investigation, thus eliminating potential inaccuracies in data.
- Flexibility: the self-help features of SmartJoin allow slicing and dicing of data without the risk of inadvertently changing the data.
The change in the process will not only reduce the costs of the resources by more than 50%, it will significantly reduce the time to produce analytics, eliminate human error issues and provide the firm 100% data auditability. And we are very happy that we made this possible for our client!