Major Canadian Retailer

Business objective & project requirements

Aiming to overcome data challenges resulting from running several operations within the company and handling large amounts of associated customer data, the retailer required a comprehensive, 360-degree customer view to support robust marketing campaigns, analytics, and reporting. The project also included fraud protection in the context of their banking service.

Project requirements:

1. A comprehensive enterprise customer data integration solution with support for multiple master layers for the same data, including party and household data layers.
2. Compatibility with future plans for graph databases and Hadoop deployment.

Initial data challenges

• Multiple retail and service operations within the company, each with their own associated customer data
• 8 separate source systems for data storage, 100+ million records
• Duplicate records for individual customers registered in more than one instance, such as when using a company-branded credit card, an in-store transaction, online interactions, or membership in a loyalty program that has run for several decades
• A legacy MDM system with 800+ highly-redundant matching rules (reduced in cooperation with Ataccama to roughly 300 rules with improved results)

Solution | phases & benefits

Ataccama designed and implemented the retailer’s customer data integration solution, integrating 100+ million records in 8 separate source systems. We improved the retailer’s data quality with cleansing and standardization, and performed data mastering and consolidation (including high quality deterministic matching, fuzzy algorithms, machine learning algorithms, and interpretation).

Beginning with 3 source systems, the retailer used this foundation to easily integrate 5 additional source systems without assistance from Ataccama through a straightforward process that reused existing configurations.

Ataccama’s solution dramatically improved the retailer’s customer analytics and marketing campaign management, and the company plans to implement support for real-time customer interactions and decision management on Hadoop. Ataccama offers a wide range of integration options, allowing us to do this sort of data preparation and improve decision management.