How Companies Are Saving Millions With A Data Health Assessment

• Category: Blog
• Thursday, 26 July 2012 05:00
• Written by Walter Lis

According to the Data Warehousing Institute, “poor data quality is costing US businesses more than $600 billion annually.” This poor data quality often leads to ineffective decision making that limits a company’s ability to leverage capital investments effectively. It can also compromise maintenance efficiency and compliance with federal rules and regulations.

Companies are now using what's known as a data health assessment in the war against bad data. The data health assessment profiles and analyzes the quality and integrity of your master data such as materials, customers, vendors and financial information. A data health assessment visualizes the existing state of your data quality against four dimensions: completeness, consistency, conformity to standards and duplicates. The report then summarizes the impact that poor data has on your business and recommends next steps to achieve measurable data and business metric optimization.

The purpose of a data health assessment is two-fold:

• Establish a baseline and foundation relative to the integrity of your company’s data
• Illustrate how your business initiatives are compromised due to poor data

Typical cases for a data health assessment include:

Customer Masters

• Incomplete with duplicate records
• Contacts rolling up to the correct department, locations and titles

Material, Supplier & Vendor Masters

• Contain incorrect attributes and non-standardized taxonomies
• Incomplete bills of materials
• Ineffective spend management decisions being made

Learn how a Data Health Assessment from Utopia can help prevent your organization’s initiatives from being compromised by poor quality data.

Walter Lis