Unlocking Customer Data for a Security Hardware Wholesaler

CASE STUDY

4-MINUTE READ

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Our Client

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Banner Solutions is a wholesaler of security hardware products for commercial, residential, access control, and automotive applications. It is a one-stop shop for all door hardware, locking, access control products, and other parts and accessories. Customers range from large retail enterprises to small locksmiths.

The Challenge at Hand

As the leading door hardware wholesale distributor, Banner Solutions experienced substantial growth in its expansive product portfolio and customer base. While expansion is good, the increase presented growth challenges, primarily centered around data quality and integration issues. As their customer base grew, this organization grappled with duplicate customer data, exacerbated by disparate source systems retaining different customer elements. The complexity was further heightened by acquisitions, contributing to inconsistency in data definitions, rules, and values.

Compounding these issues were the intricacies of managing pricing options that changed and expired per customer record. Resolving duplicate and inconsistent pricing for customers with multiple accounts is a challenge on its own. Banner Solutions knew they couldn’t continue at the current pace without implementing a modern enterprise program and enforcing governance around the definitions and use of data.

Innovative Solutions Unleashed

D3Clarity implemented a Customer Master solution that centralized the curation of customer elements, enabled customer rollups through organizational hierarchies, and implemented custom filters to enable a search of pricing libraries, books, and pages by effective dates. The benefits of implementing a Customer Master solution increased the accuracy and insight for operational and sales reporting through higher data quality and integrated data points silos that occurred through the different acquisition activities.

Transformative Results Achieved

As part of the modernization platform, Semarchy’s Unified Data Platform was chosen as the master data management (MDM) platform, and D3Clarity was selected as Banner Solution’s implementation partner of choice.

D3Clarity conducted discovery workshops to flush out detailed requirements and priorities for the project. This included defining the top 7 business use cases, which were later expanded to include testable scenarios for user acceptance testing. Within the confines of an Agile methodology, solution development occurred through an iterative and collaborative process. Project management cadences ensured all parties worked together, hurdles were unblocked, and priorities were defined for each functional sprint.

Enrichments that added completeness and accuracy to address information, validated business rules, and provided governance on data values were included. Multi-person workflows were created to reduce the manual errors previously missed during the onboarding of new customers. Utilizing Semarchy’s xDI component, new ETL jobs were created to process inbound feeds from multiple customer sources into an MDM staging location. ETL routines were developed for both initial and delta loads. Golden record information from the MDM solution was published to downstream systems. Throughout the engagement, knowledge transfer sessions were provided on the technology, customizations, deployments, data stewardship capabilities, and business user tasks. After the initial deployment, D3Clarity’s solution support was engaged to provide continued enhancements and architecture guidance.

DELIVERABLES	BUSINESS VALUE
Single source of truth from Sales and E-Commerce systems.	As new customers and contacts are added, duplicates are avoided across source systems. Inputs were validated (format, list of values, mandatory) and enriched (address correctness)
Fast searching for Customer Organizations, Locations, Accounts, and Contacts.	Business users can quickly find all the information they need for any customer.
Accurate Pricing	Accurate Pricing
Structured data across the enterprise with consistent data types, definitions, and rules.	Data stewards easily understand content, and data navigation follows a consistent process.

Through implementing a Customer Master solution, D3Clarity laid the foundation for a modern enterprise program that promises to ease the management and governance of customer data and other essential domain information, ensuring enhanced efficiency and effectiveness for years to come.