Clarity Begins At Home

Recognizing enterprise-wide supplier and customer visibility is a key requirement for effective decision making, Equifax offers world-class business information, leading technology and a proprietary data match and verification process that provides the clarity needed to manage a company's supplier and customer information. The result? Reduced supply costs and increased revenue. And that's something every business wants to come home to.

Putting out the welcome mat

Equifax is known for providing risk management, fraud protection and identity verification services for both businesses and consumers. Worldwide, hundreds of thousands of businesses rely on Equifax for information solutions to fuel their growth. For many companies, this also includes master data management solutions that provide critical insight into supplier and customer relationships.

Equifax's own strategy of coupling organic growth with acquisitions means a steady expansion in revenue, customers, markets and products - and a need to integrate and manage it all. Here, the company outlines how it leveraged its own master data management capabilities to create internal efficiencies that benefited the entire enterprise.

Challenges of a blended family

Due to the company's ongoing global growth, Equifax is continually faced with assimilating acquired companies, including their systems and data. For example, at one time, customer revenue information was spread across more than 20 billing systems, hindering the company's ability to obtain timely reports on customer profitability. Data for Equifax's business-to-business customers was further fragmented among various systems for operations, fulfillment, sales and marketing.

These systems had different ways of identifying customers, so customer information was not always integrated or complete for business managers. Because many records were incomplete, duplicated or obsolete, Equifax needed a streamlined process for consolidating and managing customer data.

To produce timely reports and gain immediate and accurate visibility into customer profitability, Equifax sought to integrate and manage 2.1 million customer records and create master data records for each.

Moving in together

The long-term plan for Equifax's enterprise-wide master data management (MDM) initiative included:

• Defining core reference data. This involved gaining consensus among data owners and business leaders of how to standardize the data using a common key and enterprise-wide hierarchy.
• Ongoing harmonization, reconciliation and dissemination of master data. Data is only valuable if it is shared; by definition, master data has to be disseminated to multiple users.

Equifax's MDM plan called for controlling master data across applications and users to maintain a single view of a given subject area. Initial efforts focused on establishing master data for the subject areas of customers, products, sales channels and delivery method.

Customer data integration was chosen as the first milestone of the plan. In order to consolidate customers across all systems for billing, operations, fulfillment, sales and marketing, the company would have to tie customer records together, in spite of wide variations in data within each system.

Equifax built a master data repository, but management knew this was only part of the overall effort. The job of data harmonization, cleansing and rationalization would be critical to the success of the initiative. Companies that try to handle these tasks internally with their data content owners and IT staffs are often blind-sided by the significant amount of work required to match, key and place customers into accurate legal hierarchies.

Equifax didn't have to look far for a solution. Ironically, it was one of its acquisitions that enabled the company to expand its competencies to include the underserved MDM segment of data rationalization and enrichment. Today, Equifax builds upon Austin-Tetra's 15 years' experience serving Fortune 1000 companies struggling to clean up and consolidate data from internal and external systems, assimilate acquired companies, and obtain full benefits from customer relationship management systems.

The Equifax Data Management Services group links customers through corporate ownership and identifies obsolete customer or prospect data. In addition, the group can enrich a client's existing data with hundreds of additional business data elements.

All under one roof

In the end, Equifax's Data Management Services group processed more than 2.1 million customer billing accounts residing in more than 20 systems against reference data from a global database of 75 million businesses. By matching customer records from disparate sources to a unique and persistent ID number, the EFX ID™, Equifax established a baseline for data integration around its customers.

Today Equifax plans and executes customer strategy in over 50,000 B2B global customer accounts across its many global business units, and Equifax leaders are able to determine total account revenue, profitability and risk exposure in each of these accounts as they manage the opportunity and risk represented by each client, all through the EFX ID™.

Key benefits of customer data integration - and the resulting accuracy and consistency of integrated records - include fewer errors, smoother on-boarding of new customers, and streamlined record maintenance. By far the most important benefit, however, is timely reporting and the vastly improved visibility into a customer's relationship with Equifax.

Another value added by the Data Management Services team is its ability to augment existing customer data with additional data, such as demographics, industry coding, and company ownership information. This added benefit has proved popular with business leaders at Equifax. For example, the marketing department has realized improved customer segmentation and targeting, while the sales team has been able to better identify and act upon cross-sell opportunities for revenue generation.

Equifax has achieved a high level of customer data integration - its initial objective for master data management initiative. Results were achieved on schedule without buying cumbersome and complex software or bringing in teams of high-priced consultants to design data quality processes. And now Equifax has a baseline to extend the value of master data management into new subject areas within its own organization.

To find out how your company can leverage the experiences of Equifax to benefit your MDM programs, please visit www.equifax.com/mdm.