Unlocking analytics by centralising product data across international sites
Background
A leading industrial sealing solutions provider was looking to break down data silos and disparate systems to unlock analytics.
The organisation's vast product data was spread across outdated legacy systems and managed manually in spreadsheets. This presented data silos that stunted cross-functional visibility due to the lack of standards and integration.
Moreover, manual processes couldn't scale to meet complex global data needs. To resolve this, they sought to break down these information silos with a custom centralised quotation platform.
Solution
A custom centralised quotation platform was developed to aggregate and unify product data from across the organisation into a single 360-degree view. ETL processes were implemented to ingest data from various sources and conform everything into a structured SQL database.
Data pre-processing including cleansing and transformation helped resolve quality issues during migration from several legacy systems where data quality issues such as duplication were evident. Key steps such as rigorous data cleansing and transformation helped resolve quality issues during this migration. The organisation ensured data standards and integration through master data management, with Normalisation and indexing optimised query performance with these massive, unified datasets.
The strict database schema design maintains separation between product data and order/operational data for easier manageability. Within their schema, there are specific sections or components dedicated exclusively to recording and describing different product combinations and the relationships between these products. This could include data about which products can be bundled together or how they relate to each other.
This ensures that data related to product combinations and relationships is not mixed or intertwined with data and processes related to order processing, CAD drawing generation or on-site installations, making the system more organised and easier to manage. This separation of concerns contributes to a more maintainable and efficient system design.
Results
Previously, quotes were issued via a multitude of different routes. Each country might have subtly different processes, and data was stored in an array of locations. This made it very difficult to compare similar products and allow senior management to glean learning points. Now that this has been brought together under one centralised system, the manufacturer is now able to compare sales made in Australia to those issued in South Africa, for example, and interrogate this data to identify patterns.
The centralised product data platform delivered:
- Consolidated 360-degree view unlocked enhanced analytics across global sites
- Improved data quality and governance
- 72x faster quotation speeds for complex configurations
- Increased visibility from reduced information silos
- Foundations to continue advancing global analytics
