Addressing Customer Data Challenges for Global Leader in Paints and Coatings

CASE STUDY

7-MINUTE READ

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Our Client

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A global leader in paints and coatings delivers the best paint and performance coating products to the world, with one of the industry’s most recognized portfolios of branded and private-label products.

The Challenge at Hand

This global organization faced critical data challenges as they had grown through more than 30 strategic acquisitions, resulting in a complex and fragmented enterprise landscape. With diverse regional and brand-specific CRM, ERP, financial, and operational systems in place, the organization struggled with poor data quality, incomplete datasets, and frequent duplications, ultimately affecting the reliability of customer analytics. Customer analytics were difficult and costly to produce and often lost the trust of the business users that were dependent on them. The distributed and siloed nature of these systems led to autonomy and cultural differences within each unit, making it difficult to answer basic questions like “Who are our 50 largest customers?” with consistent answers.

Furthermore, the organization grappled with specific customer data challenges, including multiple accounts for the same customer, disparate definitions of key customer attributes across systems, a lack of a common enterprise identifier for customers spanning multiple geographies, and limited customer hierarchies that failed to link customers in different views.

There was a pressing need for a trusted enterprise data ecosystem to overcome these challenges. Addressing these issues was vital for maintaining data consistency, building trust among business users, and ensuring the organization’s competitiveness in a dynamic global market.

Innovative Solutions Unleashed

In support of these strategic initiatives and to better understand customer behavior, improve customer experience, and gain insight into customer transactions at a global level, this organization embarked on a digital journey to embrace a global customer master data management solution.

This global giant approached D3Clarity for a solution to provide an enterprise customer source of truth for all applications that create, maintain, or ingest customer data.

Utilizing a Gartner Magic Quadrant Master Data Management (MDM) software and D3Clarity’s Data Management as a Service infrastructure, this organization took full advantage of the usability, security, performance, and operability that comes with an MDM solution to design and deploy a functional Customer Master production solution in 3.5 months.

Transformative Results Achieved

To achieve this organization’s desired results in a sustainable, repeatable, scalable, and long-term supportable manner, D3Clarity used an agile, use-case-focused approach.

Use cases were established based on integration sources and business needs.

Solving the requirement for a turnkey solution that facilitates the alignment of business operations at a global level based on a trusted, consistent set of customer data, the implementation was performed within D3Clarity’s Data Management as a Service construct.

D3Clarity provided a hosted environment that can scale on demand as the client’s volume increases and was designed for maximum security.
Installation, implementation, and continued hyper-care support were performed by D3Clarity MDM experts.
Integration access points were established for data transactions between source systems and the MDM-hosted platform.

D3Clarity conducted a 6-week Discovery phase to define and understand the phase 1 requirements to make critical decisions for the initial configuration and overall project impact. The goal was not to have every detailed requirement outlined but to have the initial alignment of pain points, use cases, and strategic advisory group cadences.

D3Clarity provided a roadmap of the project phases including key activities with their start and end dates, assigned resources and dependencies between tasks, and project milestones/sprints. This project plan was reviewed by the combined project team and published to stakeholders monthly. This allowed the combined project teams to have insights into dependencies, data gaps, key milestones, and overall project deliverables and status.

Utilizing robust data modeling capabilities, a unified data model was created that represented a person and organization record object and supported complex and dynamic queries. Relationship modeling enabled data users to perform hierarchical rollups based on the necessary view they needed.

Survivorship rules were configured to identify potential customer duplicates from the multiple ERP source systems and create a consolidated view across all customer data.

As part of the comprehensive solution, a suite of flexible workflows was developed to seamlessly accommodate various customer data operations, including updates, deletes, and an approval process for changes. User-friendly UI forms were meticulously designed, prioritizing efficient ease of use and data manipulation, empowering data stewards to manage and maintain data with ease.

During the implementation phase, an innovative approach allowed business users to access and review their data in real-time within a live environment. This capability enabled them to actively participate in the cleansing, organization, and structuring of data, ensuring it became coherent and actionable across multiple entities and diverse use cases.

Integration pipelines were established to facilitate the smooth and secure flow of data in and out of the MDM system, enhancing data accessibility and interoperability across the organization.

These pipelines also ensured the secure transfer of data, safeguarding sensitive information.

In harnessing D3Clarity’s Solution Support Services, this valued customer secured a steadfast partner as they pursue other initiatives on their journey towards mastering their data landscape.

With ongoing access to MDM subject matter expertise, they are primed for future initiatives that will drive efficiency and innovation.
Maintenance support for the customer solution and enhancement services ensure that their data management ecosystem remains robust, adaptable, and capable of meeting the evolving needs of their organization.

DELIVERABLES	BUSINESS VALUE
Executed a global MDM solution for a dependable enterprise data model.	Harmonization of global assets enables users to drill into all the connected customer data for each entity to understand retail customers on the business side (B2B), individual consumer customers (B2C), as well as their organizational relationships between various legal and financial entities, manufacturing, resellers, and individual customers.
Enhanced business intelligence via a centralized system to find, understand, and govern data through shared glossaries and lineage.	With a single platform for managing and governing all customer data, the enterprise has a comprehensive system to quickly onboard new entities, reduce data redundancies, streamline customer management, and align corporate strategies.
Implementing a centralized data management system has streamlined operations by housing critical data in one unified, accessible repository, enhancing efficiency, and decision-making.	Implementing a centralized data management system has streamlined operations by housing critical data in one unified, accessible repository, enhancing efficiency, and decision-making.
Comprehensive solution design summary	Documented artifacts of business requirements, fundamental design decisions made, architecture and interface diagram, data model overview, etc., to be used for historical references, knowledge transfers, and training guides.

With the instant nature of the D3Clarity MDM as a Service infrastructure, this customer was able to take full advantage of MDM usability, reliability, accessibility, and compliance features in less time than most traditional MDM solutions take to get a development environment installed and operational.

Working closely with the MDM Vendor and D3Clarity, the client experienced a faster time to market and achieved significant cost savings, utilizing their vendors’ expertise to help get the project from a signed contract to a business data hub in a few weeks.