Unified Customer Insights Across 80+ Companies
Unified customer master data management with real-time flow of master data to ERP, e-commerce and delivery scheduling systems. Robust data pipeline and data warehouse for integrated sales reporting across 80+ accounting ledgers.
Challenge
A farm and veterinary products and services group was struggling to get a 360 degree view of its customer base across its various business units and managed farms, each of which was structured as a separate legal entity with its own accounting and ERP.
With no systems in place to manage customer master data across these organizations and their systems, the analytics teams were burdened with manually collating data from the disparate systems in a series of complex Excel workbooks to produce executive reports; preparing some of which took over a week of effort from several resources.
Customer relationship management was an even greater challenge. Lack of efficient means to categorize customers or manage interactions with them had led to important communication being missed or too much irrelevant communication going out to customer personnel, leading to customers voicing their concerns and ultimately hurting business. Opportunities were being missed. Cross-selling benefited from reps’ relationships but was uninformed by data.
The group was heavily challenged in everything from managing relationships with its customers and prospects, maximizing the value of each customer, to optimizing the value of the mix of products and services it offered.
Engagement
The business’s Marketing / CRM, Data Analytics, and IT teams were paired with a team of highly experienced consultants in data governance, master data management, data engineering, data warehousing and business intelligence. The team performed a 360-degree analysis of business’s systems, organization, culture and processes. They studied business’s current systems, including ERP and accounting, websites and e-commerce, third party software used for managing farms and providing analytics services, and their hardware and network infrastructure. Consultants interviewed relevant business operators and their leadership to understand their operations, their pain points, and their efforts to date to improve their abilities. They analyzed the models of their ERP data in the light of their business domain, operations, and the insights they needed to drive growth and efficiencies.
Data-governance was established by creating a sustainable, multi-level org structure of data stewards and data maintenance systems and processes. Need for a central customer and contact master data management system integrated with their 80+ ERP and accounting systems was identified. A unified data warehouse with a uniform domain-driven data model across all its businesses was proposed as the single source of truth for all its cross-business insights.
The team then worked with the business to create a new domain-driven, cross-enterprise data model of customer and customer insights. Requirements, workflows and user experience for customer and contact data maintenance system were established. The automated data movement / syncing between systems, i.e., ERP, e-commerce, and service management systems, was designed to ensure data will continue to be consistent with minimal human intervention.
A deeply technical and productive team was put together by GSynergy to build the customer and contact management progressive web app and a robust API-first headless backend for managing all customer data. The headless backend would support the web app, automated interaction with the third-party e-commerce or e-service systems, and any other systems that the business may build in the future. A scalable, fully auditable, database was modeled, instantiated and loaded from existing data in the business’s ERP systems. Automation powered initial data validation and load process was built to accelerate, facilitate and inform the massive data cleansing activity across the 80+ ERP instances.
The entire build was delivered over a nine months agile project, inclusive of extensive user acceptance testing, systems integration testing, and data validation across the 80+ integrated software systems.
Results
The previously lengthy and error prone effort of creating or maintaining a customer across multiple ERP systems was reduced to minutes. The CRM team is now able to easily manage, search, and research customers across the entire enterprise from one easy to use interface. They are now able to segment their customers using BI and manage their customer communication groups easily and confidently.
The unified data warehouse is now the established single source of truth for the foundational customer and sales data. It is the go-to place for the analytics personnel to build dashboards and reports. By establishing a domain-driven model for the BI data warehouse, the business team has been enabled in using self-service dashboarding tools to easily draw useful and consistent insights about customers and sales. The customer insights reports that took several resources over a week to create can now be created instantly and on demand by anyone with access to the report / data.
Soon after delivery, the software was successfully handed off to the customer’s IT associates for operation and maintenance.