CASE STUDY - Emerson Process Management Unifies Account Data for a Stronger Revenue Stream
- By Nancy Rybeck
- May 8, 2007
Commentary by Nancy Rybeck, Customer Data Warehouse Strategy Architect, Emerson Process Management
A Need for Coordination and Consolidation
Emerson Process Management, a leading global supplier of process-oriented products and services, is a $3 billion operating unit of St. Louis-based Emerson, the Fortune 500 global technology and engineering firm.
Responding to global competition and a drive to increase profitability, Emerson Process Management has evolved from a product-centric organization to a customer-focused enterprise. Consequently, the organization required technology that could enhance its knowledge about the customers and partners of its global sales and manufacturing divisions. Understanding each customer fully and completely required accurate information instantly available to all reaches of the Emerson organization.
This was a daunting challenge, as Emerson Process Management’s customer name and address data—representing over 75 business units—resided in multiple operational systems. It was found that 80 to 90 percent of those records could potentially be duplicates. To make matters worse, each division around the globe had its own method of managing its customer data. Each maintained its own database with a unique representation of customer names and addresses. This uncoordinated approach to customer relationship management could not support the firm’s goals.
Gaining a Single Customer View
Emerson Process Management now uses Group 1 Software’s flagship data quality solution, the Customer Data Quality (CDQ) Platform, which provides enterprisewide correction, validation, and enhancement of customer, prospect, and supplier data. The CDQ Platform is helping Emerson Process Management meet its goal of obtaining a single view of each customer and partner. In a short time, 70 percent of its customer and partner address records had been identified as duplicates and eliminated. Also, nearly 85 percent of the unique business sites within its database had also been deduplicated.
Emerson is an excellent example of how improved data quality can help increase the agility of a company,thus contributing to a strong revenue stream, better operational efficiency, and increased shareholdervalue.
“As a long-time Group 1 customer, our decision to adopt the CDQ Platform was guided by the solution’s unparalleled global address data support,” said Nancy Rybeck, customer data warehouse strategy architect at Emerson Process Management. “And with a majority of our customers and partners doing business with many of our divisions, we required a solution such as the CDQ Platform that could perform powerful, user-defined record consolidation.”
The CDQ Platform is an integral component of the organization’s marketing efforts, most notably cross-selling and up-selling initiatives developed to expand penetration of existing accounts. With higher-quality data and an increased customer focus, Emerson Process Management has seen tangible benefits, most significantly a double-digit percent increase in purchases per customer, a reduction in selling costs, and improved customer satisfaction.
Emerson is an excellent example of how improved data quality can help increase the agility of a company, thus contributing to a strong revenue stream, better operational efficiency, and increased shareholder value. They are one of thousands of progressive organizations that understand you are only as good as your data.
An Essential Component of Customer Data Quality
This solution combines leading-edge data quality functions in a single dataflow environment so you can make more informed business decisions. Sophisticated parsing, standardization, matching algorithms, and advanced address validation tools work together seamlessly so you can unify account data, eliminate redundancies, link members of the same household, and expand your customer knowledge.
This article originally appeared in the issue of .