Data Cleansing: Spring Clean Your Data!

Your business collects data to help you make better decisions. But when your data is full of duplicate records or missing key information, it’s hard to make those better decisions. That’s why data cleansing is something every business needs to schedule regularly. It’s April, the time of year when many of us tackle spring cleaning projects. So? Maybe you should add spring cleaning your data to that project list!

Why Is Data Cleansing Necessary?

If data is finding its way into systems and software via numerous entry points or via numerous individuals, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to get either duplicates or mislabled/missing entries.

While that might not seem like a big deal, we beg to differ. Missing and mislabled data makes for misinformation. Information (data) drives business decisions and dollars spent. When misinformed managers and executives make big decisions based on that misinformation, sales and productivity can plummet. And that’s NOT good business.

Ditch The Duplicates

Your sales team is celebrating a huge milestone! ONE HUNDRED new client accounts in the fourth quarter. Time for a party and maybe some bonuses for top sellers, especially Stuart, the sales superhero of the quarter.

But, wait a minute. A careful audit of new accounts reveals an issue. Stuart has duplicate accounts for all of his fourth quarter sales. What looked like 22 new accounts, is actually eleven, and the new account milestone wasn’t actually met.

This is just one way duplicate records can cause issues which cost your company.

Fill In The Blanks

Sometimes partial records are pulled or input into systems. That’s not a big deal. You can go back and add the data later, right? Sure. But good intentions are often forgotten amidst our busy workdays. Making the call or sending the email to get that last bit of information often gets postponed and then forgotten. But one little bit of missing information can’t cause a real problem, can it?

It ABSOLUTELY can and often does. Maybe that missing piece of information is the number that marks a purchase order. Without the purchase order, there’s no work order sent to the employee charged with completing the work for a specific client. That client calls a week later to get an update on progress. But no progress has been made because Paul didn’t know he was supposed to be doing any work for that client. Now you have an unhappy customer.

That’s a pretty extreme case. One that could lose a sale or a repeat customer. But missing information, even on a smaller scale, can create issues productivity. Productive employees are important to daily business operations. The cost of lost productivity won’t be felt as immediately as the loss of a customer, but it will eventually be noticed and will impact the bottom line.

Normalize Naming & Other Conventions

Naming conventions? Sounds complicated. But it’s really not. For example, let’s talk about people’s names. Generally we have a first and a last name (and some of us have middle names, but that’s not important here). For legal documents and purposes, it’s important to have the legal name, which is generally the first and last name. For less regulated purposes, like email marketing, only the first name might be used. Thus it’s important that when a name is added, you get all parts of the name that are important for various use cases.

And don’t forget those suffixes. There’s a big difference between First Last Sr. and First Last Jr. Senior is the owner and CEO. Junior is eighteen, about to start college, and working in the mail room to earn some spending money. It’s important that data and documents meant for Senior aren’t mistakenly sent to Junior.

Naming doesn’t only apply to people. What about items you need to keep in stock? Perhaps you use parts numbers, but what if your supply managers order by name. And somehow your inventory system has three slightly different names for the same item or part. Your company might be losing valuable dollars buying more items than inventory actually demands.

Data Cleansing Makes For Clean Numbers

And numbers are used to make most business decisions. Decisions to purchase. Decisions to sell. Decisions to award contracts. Decisions to award raises. So it only makes sense to keep the data clean so the numbers tell the real and correct story. Otherwise decisions that seem solid might actually be based on nothing.

So make data cleansing part of your regular data management process. And reap the benefits and peace of mind clean data can deliver.