CASE STUDY - Intellidyn Uses Data Integration to Manage Industry-Leading Consumer Information
- By Daniel Teachey
- May 8, 2007
Commentary by Daniel Teachey, Corporate Communications Director, DataFlux
The Business
Intellidyn is an award-winning provider of the nation’s most complete direct-response marketing and multi-channel database marketing and analytics solutions, delivering strategic insight and end-to-end marketing services to consumer businesses. In addition to compiling one of the industry’s most “battle-proven” prospect databases, Intellidyn also maintains the largest, most in-depth repository of transaction, credit, demographic, and behavioral databases in the nation. The company provides unparalleled expertise in data analytics and integrated marketing to consistently boost ROI.
The Challenge
Building a successful consumer-centric data warehouse has been a challenge for many companies. The majority of these attempts have failed to meet expectations. Since data management was the very core of Intellidyn’s business, failure was not an option for the company. Intellidyn’s experience was that data warehousing and customer relationship management were not the sole domain of IT. Success was in allowing savvy database marketers to drive the IT solution.
More importantly, the competitive environment was becoming more fluid and dynamic. As consumers embraced new channels, such as online shopping and voice-activated transactions, these radically increased not only the volume of data that Intellidyn clients were handling, but also the speed at which it had to be processed. Intellidyn needed a data integration solution that could accurately and consistently identify individuals—and all data elements relating to those individuals—across 60 terabytes of data on more than 190 million U.S. customers in real time, while being transparent to “power users.”
Since Intellidyn continuously updates its data warehouse from multiple sources as fresher information becomes available, the solution view had to span all disparate data sources to compile complete, accurate records of individuals, households, and addresses from over 2,000 unique attributes. This new platform also needed to integrate seamlessly with the company’s existing IT platform. Additionally, to address the changing marketplace, Intellidyn would require an agile system that could answer complex queries in seconds, while converting, scoring, and arraying massive master file refreshes.
Intellidyn needed a data integration solution that could accurately and consistently identify individuals across 60 terabytes of data on more than 190 million U.S. customers in real time, while being transparent to ‘power users.’
The Solution
Intellidyn implemented an enterprise data warehouse using DataFlux data management technology to handle data profiling, data quality, data integration, and data enrichment. DataFlux provided Intellidyn with the flexibility to create match codes based on fuzzy logic algorithms. The integration of this logic allowed Intellidyn to create different degrees of matching accuracy, doubling the company’s matching efficiency.
DataFlux technology gave Intellidyn the ability to perform phonetic matching, cleanse common data errors, and standardize the entire production process so that all consumer data could be linked consistently over time at three levels: individual, household, and address. This solution enables Intellidyn to generate more than 1 billion linking keys in less than 24 hours.
The Results
The DataFlux solution has contributed to an impressive increase in the efficiency of Intellidyn’s data management. Access time to multiple master files decreased from 22 hours to 6. Intellidyn clients now have current, accurate, and reliable views of their customers within hours, instead of the days or even weeks that the same process once took. The enterprise data management solution offers Intellidyn a “360-degree view” of every consumer in the United States.
“It all comes down to what consumers demand from our marketing clients—‘know me … or my loyalty drops to zero,’” said Peter Harvey, president of Intellidyn. “DataFlux provides the ability to build the customer-centric views enabling smart marketers to demonstrate to their customers that they do in fact ‘know them.’ In return, these marketers realize continuous boosts in performance. Without this critical data foundation, all other data warehousing and CRM functionality is compromised.”
This article originally appeared in the issue of .