Luxury Industry: Data Hub for Contact Management

Our client is a world leader in the luxury goods industry whose goal was to obtain a 360-degree view of the distributors of its products around the globe.. This need arose during the design phase of the distributor portal: where to find the right data?

Indeed, distributor data was scattered in several systems that were themselves distributed in several silos: sales data was located in the CRM and invoicing data in the ERP.

Contact names and addresses were stored in both systems, but not necessarily identical. Data inconsistencies are often caused by input errors and different functional objectives: these problems are often encountered in organizations that have not yet set up a data repository. Successful digitization requires good quality data.

Challenges

Ability to reconcile data stored in different systems.
No consistency in distributor identifiers across different systems.
Heterogeneity of existing IT landscape with regard to source systems.
Correcting data manually in each system is not an option because the volume of data is too large.
Presence of duplicates within the same system.

Our solution
Data Management

We first scheduled a series of workshops with key industry stakeholders. The objective was to understand the data and its location and to determine the implementation phases of an iterative approach:

  • Prioritization of data sources to be integrated.
  • Matching of data sources using fuzzy matching functions.
  • Implementation of automatic correction rules.
  • Automated creation of a management application for data curators to handle cases where automatic correction rules are not sufficient.
  • Ability to automate data consumption in a few clicks.

After evaluating the data hub market leaders and the possibility of a custom implementation, we chose to use Semarchy’s intelligent data hub:

  • It has all the necessary functionalities as soon as it is installed because it is a product dedicated to data processing.
  • The implementation only consists of data modeling and configuration: there is no development.
  • Responsive web data applications are generated almost automatically.

  • An ETL is used to push data from source systems into the Semarchy database.
  • Semarchy processes sales prices in its database (e.g., automatic data validation).
  • The data stewards manually correct in the data management application provided by Semarchy the selling prices that could not be processed automatically.
  • The correct sales prices are sent to the distributor portal via an API.
    Distributors use their portal with correct sales prices.

Benefits

FRESH AND CONSISTENT DATA

Retailers have quickly adopted the portal because they trust the quality of the information they interact with.

SAVING TIME AND PRODUCTIVITY

The automatic data validation process handles 80% of the cases.

The work of the data stewards is limited to cases where the validation process cannot be automated when human intervention becomes mandatory.

Manual data consolidation used to take weeks of work: sales prices are now consolidated in minutes.

AUDITABILITY

The consolidation of sales prices is historically recorded in Semarchy and can be consulted at any time (e.g. who changed which price at which time).

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