DONG Energy is one of the leading energy groups in Northern Europe with approximately 6,400 employees and EUR 7.6 billion in revenue in 2011.
The other day I sat down with Ole Andres, project manager at DONG Energy, and talked about how they have utilized a new tool called iDQ™ (instant Data Quality) in order to keep up with data quality around customer master data.
iDQ™ is basically a very advanced search engine capable of being integrated into business processes in order to get data quality for contact data right the first time and at the same time reduce the time needed for looking up and entering contact data.
Fit for multiple business processes
Customer master data is used within many different business processes. Dong Energy has successfully implemented iDQ™ within several business processes, namely:
- Assigning new customers and ending old customers on installation addresses
- Handling returned mail
- Debt collection
Managing customer master data in the utility sector has many challenges as there are different kinds of addresses to manage such as installation addresses, billing addresses and correspondence addresses as well as different approaches to private customers and business customers including considering the grey zone between who is a private account and who is a business account.
New technology requires change management
Implementing new technology into a large organization doesn’t just go by itself. Old routines tend to stick around for a while. DONG Energy has put a lot of energy, so to say, into training the staff in reengineering business processes around customer master data on-boarding and maintenance including utilizing the capabilities of the iDQ™ tool.
Acceptance of new tools comes with building up trust in the benefits of doing things in a new way.
Benefits in upstream data quality
A tool like iDQ™ helps a lot with safeguarding the quality of contact data where data is born and when something happens in the customer data lifecycle. A side effect, which is at least as important stresses Ole Andres, is that data collection is going much faster.
Right now DONG Energy is looking into further utilizing the rich variety of reference data sources that can be found in the iDQ™ framework.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 