Comments on: Hidden Costs of Duplicate Customer Data

By: Why Govern Master Data? | Hub Designs Blog

Why Govern Master Data? | Hub Designs Blog — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 01:51:55 +0000

[...] real costs of duplicate data in your customer master [...]

By: It’s Good To Be On The First Page of Google « Hub Designs Blog

It’s Good To Be On The First Page of Google « Hub Designs Blog — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 01:59:01 +0000

[...] Master Data Management is Similar to ERP was #1 for “erp master data”, and Hidden Costs of Duplicate Customer Data was #1 for “hidden customer [...]

By: Thank You To Our Readers « Hub Designs Blog

Thank You To Our Readers « Hub Designs Blog — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 22:47:21 +0000

[...] article on the Hidden Costs of Duplicate Customer Data has received 1,175 total views over the past year, and How Master Data Management is Similar to [...]

By: Secondary sales management

Secondary sales management — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 10:26:42 +0000

Duplication can be checked by some good tools. It is ok if it is up to 15% but should check carefully to not to exceed that. The whole post is so good with lot of information.

Reena

By: Informatica Data Quality Matching Algorithms: Eliminate duplicates and reduce costs « Edgewater Technology Weblog

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:09:32 +0000

[...] you looking for a way to cut costs from operations? Matching algorithms can help you do it! Duplication data consolidation can deliver a direct cost savings to an organization’s operations through the elimination of redundant, costly [...]

By: Satesh

Satesh — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:56:58 +0000

Excellent Post Dan!!! Written from a business perspective rather than DQ terms alone.

Specially liked the bit “And there are very real costs to not de-duplicating your customer data” – the stats provided truly depict the financial/brand infringement that could occur due to bad data. The post remembers me of an article by Henrik Liliendahl (http://bit.ly/4oD1wb) as to how Copenhagen could be duplicated due to muli-lingual/human processing challenges leading to multiple contacts/customer record for a single customer

Satesh

By: Dan Power

Dan Power — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:04:35 +0000

Thanks for the kind words, William. And thanks for the mentions on LinkedIn and Twitter – every little bit helps!

Perhaps you’d like to write a guest article on the Hub Designs Blog someday?

Best regards — Dan

By: William Sharp

William Sharp — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:14:52 +0000

Dan,
Great information! More of these types of studies need to be conducted. In fact, you’ve inspired me to track the cost savings that my efforts deliver! On one project alone, I was able to deliver $450,000 in marketing cost reductions in the first year. When expanded to the lifecycle of marketing campaigns at this particular client, the total cost reduction was in the neighborhood of $1,350,000.
Thanks for the data in this post. I’ve tried to blast it out there on LinkedIn and Twitter!
Regards,
William

By: Dan Power

Dan Power — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 23:49:31 +0000

Thanks for the kind words, Phil. This article sparked some great discussion – hope to see it continue!

By: Phil Simon

Phil Simon — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 22:08:21 +0000

Dan –

You could write a book about this line:

I think you’re right that the real cost of duplication is only addressed when business processes are re-engineered to use shared data on a centralized repository like an MDM hub.

Great discussion all around.

By: Dan Power

Dan Power — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:22:57 +0000

Thanks for the thoughtful comment, Kenneth. You make several good points from a number of different industries. I think you’re right that the real cost of duplication is only addressed when business processes are re-engineered to use shared data on a centralized repository like an MDM hub.

Thanks for dropping by the blog – I hope you’ll visit again soon, and if you’d ever like to contribute an article as a guest author, we’d be interested in that too.

By: Kenneth Hansen

Kenneth Hansen — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:16:32 +0000

The percentage of customer data duplicated in source systems varies much more widely and largely reflects the method by which products are sold/provided/managed and how the organisation has grown. e.g. insurance companies tended to create new silo systems for every new product and rarely migrated records from old systems to new when they acquired other companies so it is not unusual to see records of the “same customer” many many times. Another reason for “duplicates” is that business customers/suppliers merge or acquire each other.

Success in de-duplication depends in large part on the extent to which customers are involved – that’s easier in healthcare, where both parties are anxious to ensure all the correct data is collated, than vendors who do not want to lose face and prefer to err on the safe side. Consequerntly most banks have matched large numbers of records of personal customers but still have a significant percentage that they dare not match because of the cost (financial and embarrassment) of an erroneous match. That applies particularly to banks who opened customer accounts in countries and times when prospective customers did not have to show an identity card.

MDM does not reduce duplicated data as it often simply cross-references all the different records and that is valuable for reporting with aggregations per customer. The real cost of duplicate records is only reduced where processes on legacy systems are rewritten for shared use of customer data from a central server.

By: Thomas Dye, CCP

Thomas Dye, CCP — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:30:39 +0000

A recent client had lots of duplicate entities in source data, but a lot of that was by design. Their source systems allowed multiple duplicate customer records tied to a single account. The ongoing challenge was to change their thinking from the customer/account model to the party organization and individual model for master data. Common discussion was on the ‘real’ percent of duplicates and whether or not duplicate customers tied to a single account counted as a duplicate or not. Our thoughts: for cleansing for MDM purposes, these would always be counted as dups.