- 8 mins
If your company is generating more and more information, it is likely that you should prepare it to make it more competitive towards data dominance.
Data has a big influence on businesses and their products, which is why the number of companies that are adopting digital transformation strategies is increasing, since they are aware that they could stagnate in a market that is increasingly competitive due to the endless opportunities that technology has made available for us.
Such is the impact of data that, according to a study carried out by Gartner, working with poor quality data costs companies $12.9 million dollars a year, which is a negative effect, not only in the short term for budget, but in the medium and long term due to possible deficient decision-making.
In order to prevent this from affecting the development of your company, it is very important to know where you could be currently failing and how to solve those possible cracks within your daily operation. In the following lines we will help you identify pain points and how to prevent them from being a blowout to your finances and performance.
How to identify poor data quality?
Due to the volume of data that your company manages, it may be increasingly difficult for you to detect poor processing quality; however, the side effects of this can be seen in all areas: finance, marketing, human resources, sales, logistics, operations, supply, accounting, legal, etc.
In this sense, poor data quality begins when the following situations occur in your information:
• Inaccuracy in your information.
• Incomplete data.
• Inconsistent data.
• Duplicates.
• Records out of time.
• Invalid data.
• Outdated data.
• Unequal data.
If you are able to identify delays in delivery times, inaccurate reports and analyses, errors in your databases, paused projects or inaccurate figures when evaluating key processes in your business such as the registration and deregistration of suppliers, information capture, sales records, personnel rotation, marketing results, finances, logistics, and more, you may be facing a problem in the quality of your data and need to implement a cleansing process on it.
Regardless of whether there is more than one error, the consequences this could have on your business strategies or decision making could be catastrophic; data cleansing solves this problem since it is the previous step for advanced analytics and algorithms, which will help you build possible scenarios for the future of your company.
Working with disparate data hinders the Data-driven development of companies and their initiatives such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. It is useless to have or implement these technologies if your data has poor quality.
Understanding data cleansing
In Experian's words, data cleansing is the action of identifying, in order to subsequently eliminate or repair, any data or record within a database. Let’s dive deeper into this.
Have you ever been in a candy store? It is admirable to see how each candy is separated by color, flavor, size, price range, even by categories such as lollipops, chewing gum, gummies and more.
This arrangement makes your visit more pleasant, since you can take the time to calmly walk the corridors, sometimes taste test some of the candy, to finally decide on the ones you liked the most for buying.
However, to achieve this experience, there had to be a team that was in charge of placing each sweet in its place, which involved getting rid of those that were no longer useful or were broken and those that were in a different stand placed in their right place. Something similar happens with data cleansing.
Sometimes, your company’s info comes from different sources, which implies that, when merging or emptying it in another system, there is room for duplicate, disparate, incomplete, false or mislabeled data. The solution for this is data cleansing.
Data cleansing is beneficial for you and your clients, since it helps to save time and resources, and also you can get to know your clients deeply and know what they expect from you. This happens through an omnichannel strategy, which will be explained up next.
How does data cleansing impact your business?
It is important to mention the impact of non-automated data cleansing, for example, the productivity of a company's staff, who spend more time on corrections compared to other tasks. There is an estimate that data scientists spend 80% of their time cleaning information, which leaves a reduced margin to analyze and identify insights, results that could change the performance of a company.
If we transfer this example to areas like marketing, finance, operations, etc., the progress of your business would be facing a serious problem.
However, by automating processes such as data cleansing with an efficient platform, information processing and the development of other processes like data transformation are made easier. Is it possible to do both from one place? The answer is yes.
With a robust solution adjusted to the needs of your company, it is possible to carry out processes such as those mentioned above. These are achievable thanks to a well-planned design to manage information automatically, as long as they are hosted in a database. What else can a solution like this do for you, in addition to cleansing data? You will be able to:
• Validate your information from different sources.
• Standardize your data, however varied they may be.
• See the advantages of centralizing your data to generate better reports.
If you manually clean and transform data, you will see that the margin of error is greater and the response time increases. The automation of your company's daily tasks such as registrations of data, collection of purchases or sales, and a wide range of procedures can be optimized with Arkon Data Platform and thus completely boost your whole organization.
Why should you implement data cleansing in your business?
Data should generate trust within your company to avoid affecting the performance of your work team. It is time to land the key elements that will make you decide why you should take the step towards data cleansing and, if you already did, it is time to make it more efficient:
1. Reliable decisions: With clean data, you will be able to present a more realistic picture of where your company is standing and where it should go. The more curated your information is and the cleaner your data, the more reliable your decisions will be.
2. Increased effectiveness: Data cleansing will not only make you trust your decisions more, but also guarantees the acceleration of processes without neglecting the quality and reliability of them, all thanks to clean data.
3. Risk assessment: A data cleansing project gives you the opportunity to further assess and analyze the financial risks your business faces at all levels and stages.
4. Focus on your audience: To be more precise when approaching your customers, keeping your data updated is highly functional. This way you will know what to offer and when to do it.
5. Compliance: For audit issues, having your data updated, cleaned and organized will make you feel sure about doing things right inside and outside your company. Complying with documentation and standards is also part of data cleansing.
6. Productivity: Your team, by not being focused on correcting or repairing information, will be able to invest time in business strategies, and they will do so with greater precision, and above all, with reliable data.
Conclusion
As you can see throughout this blog, data cleansing is an exercise by which your business strategies can increase your productivity, since accurate and reliable data gives you the ability to launch projects and make well-informed decisions.
Check out the most prominent benefits of implementing good data cleansing:
• Decision making becomes reliable thanks to data accuracy.
• Your decisions will be more efficient compared to your competitors.
• Your processes and operations will be more effective by saving time.
• The evaluation of the possible risks and opportunities of your strategies will be effective.
• Building scenarios is possible thanks to the precision of the information.
• Your compliance processes will always be in order.
Contact us through our website or social networks and let's start a highly effective data cleansing process. Let's take your business to the next level.
