Audaxium Blog

Garbage in, Garbage out!  I hear this comment almost every other day.  And it’s not me saying it, it’s the customer.

Then why oh why are most companies in such a state of disrepair when it comes to their customer information?

How can we fix this up when we implement NetSuite?

How can we make sure that it doesn’t happen again?  Or at least not to the same degree.

But first let’s get to the top 3 reasons why this happens.

Data Data Everywhere

Most companies simply can’t get track of customer data,  sales numbers, etc simply because it lives in so many different systems.  Copies of information abound.  And there is no one data source that can be relied upon to be accurate.

If you have spreadsheets that hold critical business information, and they need to be updated regularly by multiple users you likely have a bit of a mess on your hands.  There are tools built specifically for managing spreadsheets and providing revision control.  They’re good, but you’ll still have the problem in other areas even if you’re a spreadsheet guru.

Pick 3 pieces of important information.  Customer contact email address.  Customer shipping address.  Last purchased item by that customer.  Walk around the office and ask people where to find that information.  I DARE YOU!

Discipline

Frankly, employees don’t feel they have the time to clean up the mess created by others.  The people who implemented all the tools they have to use.  And, they don’t feel they’ll get any credit for keeping things tidy.

Employees get paid to sell, help customers, ship products, solve problems.  It’s pretty rare that their job is to clean up information and make sure it’s all accurate. At least if you ask them what their job is.

Even if you do tell them to tidy up the information as they work day to day, it’s often too easy to skip that step and move on.  Avoiding “non-critical” work is something most of us do very well.

Audit

Most companies don’t have any ability, or inclination, to examine the state of the information held in all the different systems around the office.  The IT department concerns themselves, normally, with infrastructure and systems themselves.  They rarely use their skills in statistics to monitor the actual data.

If you don’t measure, you can’t improve.  And if you’re not improving, things just don’t stay the same.  They get worse.

Some Suggestions for a Solution

So what can we do?

Clean up the Data

One of the key tasks when implementing a new CRM or ERP system is the data import.  And a big chunk of that is cleaning the data.  When you do an implementation is when everyone starts to care about what’s what.  Particularly when implementing NetSuite, as everything is integrated.

I fully believe, as do a few others around the office.  There there is almost as much benefit to be had in re-implementing old software, and cleaning up the data, as there is in implementing a new system.  Not quite, but sometimes cleaning up data leads to all sorts of benefits.  For example:

• Redefine business processes
• Identify opportunities for integration
• Change job descriptions
• Eliminate loss making products
• Identify additional items or services to sell
• etc, etc.

Put it into a Master System

Once you clean your data, you’ll recognize, immediately, the benefit of having that information in a central system that represents the master record.  One source of the truth it shall be!  After all, you don’t want to get into this mess again!

What does Cleaning Mean?

Simple question.  The answer being it depends on the data.  But here’s a partial list of what it can mean.

• Verify Accuracy – Simple ensuring that the information you have on file is accurate.
• De-dupe – Get rid of information that is just a copy, or is trying to represent the same thing
• Remove – Get rid of old, irrelevant records.
• Rationalize – For each record, get rid, or hide, fields that are no longer used or relevant
• Categorize – Bundle up useless information into useful clumps.  Ex.  If you have 500 customer industries, hand keyed in by reps over the years, turn that data into 30 industry categories.
• Add Value – Add fields, and information, that will allow you to conduct better analyzes in the future
• Reformat – Mostly important when moving information to a new system, it may be very useful to standardize the formatting for readability, analysis, or importing.

Review and Enforce

Once you’ve completed your task of getting everything tidy, you face the bigger challenge of keeping it that way.

Quite simple you need to conduct regular reviews of your information and hold people accountable.  Here’s my bullets:

• Build a culture that says “Getting Organized” = Work
• Assign a person in each department to be responsible for data quality
• Build some measurable metrics on your data.  Review them regularly.
• Ensure everyone knows “Never Pass a Fault”
• Talk to people who don’t fix errors as they find them.

Hopefully this post gave you a little something to think about.  Comments always welcome