Background
Over time many businesses collect a variety of different systems that don't communicate well with each other. The business grows and so does the collection of IT systems. Some of them can be quite dated and a few may have earned the title 'legacy system'. These legacy systems can be challenging to integrate with. Employees work around the problems and create their own spreadsheets or siloed “crapplications” to help make sense of the various sources of information they use at work, but this just adds to the risk of substantial errors.
One major motor vehicle distributor and retailer was faced with this problem.
The Challenge
Dozens of specialised systems fed into one specialised vertical system that could not be easily integrated with other systems. Many rogue systems and processes were developed to accommodate a variety of business needs including marketing, procurement, analytics, customer service to name a few. Some spreadsheets were so complex they required specialised hardware and hours to calculate. Some marketing processes involved many manual steps, leading to errors, and took up to five days to prepare the data for a campaign.
The Solution
Alan Perkins designed V360 for a business to address their cacophony of IT systems. V360 is a specialised automated data unification platform designed to consolidate data from multiple disparate sources including several proprietary data formats. V360 provided the foundation to build an automated data migration platform for a new multi-million dollar SAP implementation.
V360 also provided many marketing benefits, for example, its ability to de-duplicate data on the fly in real-time, ensuring the best possible data quality. Having a platform that unified data across All sources meant that a holistic view of each customer could be obtained for the first time ever. Marketing campaigns could be more easily focused, and what used to take days could now be achieved in seconds with a higher quality result.
Results
V360 provided the foundation to build an automated data migration platform for a new multi-million dollar SAP implementation. Data migration became a turnkey process, with full auditability back to source.
With access to properly deduplicated and cleansed data, marketing campaigns became a breeze: what previously took almost a whole week of careful manipulation through several spreadsheets became a single automated process that ran in under ten minutes.
Having a platform that unifies data across all sources means that a holistic view of each customer can be obtained for the first time ever.
Alan Perkins was named a finalist in the ITNews’ Benchmark Awards, Consumer CIO of the Year 2017 for the V360 project.
As ITNews proclaimed, V360 is indeed "one data warehouse to rule them all".
Technology Used
- SQL Server
- C#
- JSON metadata language for intelligent automated generation of code.
Marketing campaigns could be more easily focused, and what used to take days could now be achieved in seconds with a higher quality result
