Why Companies Should Invest In Data Projects During Budget Cuts
NBA players and teams don’t stop preparing for game time when their season’s suspended.
Neither should you.
With conferences, major events, and travel plans cancelled due to Covid-19, coupled with the price of oil dropping, some companies have started drastically scaling back on their budgets for 2020 and halting or even canceling any non-critical projects for precautionary measures.
Given these developments and cuts, why is now the time to recommend projects centered around data problems especially cleansing and archiving? Because businesses can’t afford NOT to. Here’s why:
With travel restrictions in effect, we have a chance to focus on lower-cost remote projects that deliver long term value while reclaiming capital expenditure.
Reduce your expenditures using projects that pay for themselves. Data projects can cover the cost of the project and help companies save millions of dollars
Keep momentum going to maintain resource utilization and readiness for future initiatives
To explain how investing in data projects now will ensure long lasting benefits, let’s quickly review the concepts of data cleansing and archiving at a high-level.
Data Archiving
There is a common misconception that archived data gets sent somewhere only IT can access. However, archiving works a lot like backing up your photos on your iPhone. You can move your older pictures to iCloud, for example, to free up storage space on your phone. However, any time you want to view them, they can be retrieved with a few clicks. Your archived data is just as accessible by all users.
There are a few ways to archive but the general idea is to move the old data off the current ERP or other systems (like SAP, Oracle, etc.) you are using, load it to the cloud or a server that you aren’t using, then build hooks into your reporting platform.
Data Cleansing
If a data governance tool has not been in place to ensure data quality, your systems will likely have a large amount of duplicate and incomplete data. Data cleansing helps de-duplicate data and enrich missing parts of records using accelerators such as templates and data dictionaries. A recommended next step is to restructure data to follow industry or best practice standards and enforce data quality rules using a governance tool.
How Data Projects Can Save You Money
Knowing what data cleansing and archiving are, what are the key benefits that make these initiatives something you can’t afford to do when cutting costs?
Most companies don’t realize just how much manual effort and, as a result, unnecessary costs result from the manual intervention driven around poor data. One of our customers, a Large Electric Utility (10M+ customers) was experiencing deteriorating performance of billing and call center activities due to high data volumes as well as a rapidly expanding SAP Database footprint. After a 6-month Archiving engagement, their SAP database size went from 5.6 TB down to less than 1 TB. This resulted in a dramatically reduced system response time and system back up time. Not only was their call center able to service more customers in less time as a result, but their IT was now better prepared to move forward with upcoming large-scale transformation initiatives such as an SAP S/4HANA upgrade. This also lets them potentially lower license fees, hosting costs, and on-going maintenance costs when they move to cloud platforms.
Cleansing and Archiving results in savings that surpasses the cost of the project and can free up much needed revenue critical during a season of budget cuts. Companies can also find savings in assets and spare parts. For example, a global EPC company was able to identify $56M in parts they didn’t even know they had as a result of cleansing , a $1300% return on their investment just on parts that would have been re-ordered. This does not include cost of warehousing, hot shot orders, and labor cost for wasted service runs with the wrong equipment. Going through this data cleansing project along with implementation of an MDM product saved them millions.
When the budgets are expanded again and companies are able to re-instate projects that were previously put on hold, the data is primed and ready for migration. As a result, these migration projects will be significantly quicker with reduced risk because you are only moving clean and relevant data.
Start Now!
With companies looking at ways to save money or reduce spending, solving data problems by cleansing and archiving are minimally disruptive ways to do so. As a result, an ROI on both the business and IT side is shown within weeks. These projects can be delivered remotely, reducing project costs and making sure your organization remains productive day to day. In addition, you maintain momentum towards your business goals while laying the foundation for success.
Logic Point can help guide you with data projects such as these. Your project won’t start without a clear business case and we offer pilots and Proofs-of-Concept to validate projected savings. We recommend starting by evaluating your data health, either internally or through our Data Sherpa Health Assessment.