Let's get real about building a better customer data model (page 1 of 3)

"Companies are scrutinizing their ERP [enterprise resource planning] investments and finding that it's not enough just to implement the software," says Erin Kinikin, research director for enterprise applications at Santa Clara, California-based Forrester Research.

"You have to implement the business processes that go with the software," Kinikin emphasizes. "For example, if the people who take the orders can't interact with the people who process them and take the cash, your order-to-cash process is probably going to be suboptimal.

Integration between different applications is critical, to ensure that all information is shared and available. Yet all this sharing doesn't really help the business if there's no common customer view."

Customer data is notoriously difficult to use. "Regardless of how centralized you are, you probably have multiple sources of customer information," says Kinikin. "Not only is each source probably duplicative and not clean but also when you try to combine them and look, for example, across sales and marketing to do lead optimization, suddenly you're not even speaking the same language."

Turning on a Dime
With Oracle's new Oracle Customer Data Hub, companies such as Network Appliance Inc., Telecom New Zealand, and Master Lock are automating their business processes across the enterprise more effectively, accessing better business information, and ensuring that all departments and partners have the same consistent, accurate view of each customer.

In the high-technology sector, for example, Network Appliance survived the downturn by targeting and winning an entirely new customer base. "We needed to replace our technology customers with more-stable, less-cyclical customers," says Scot Klimke, CIO of the US$892 million manufacturer of network-attached storage systems in Sunnyvale, California. "About 75 percent of our revenue now comes from six new key vertical markets and industries."

How did Network Appliance turn things around so quickly? The company implemented the Oracle E-Business Suite and the Oracle Customer Data Hub, which provides a meta customer directory, where customer profile information is consolidated and reconciled, that's accessed by all of the company's transaction systems.

The Oracle Customer Data Hub has worked well in three ways. "We had a very fragmented view of the customer, with one system showing the support phone calls and another containing information about shipping, billing, and invoicing," says Klimke.

"So when a customer called, our employee didn't have access to all the information needed to answer the customer's questions. The second benefit is lower cost," Klimke adds. "Whereas most companies typically have 1 database administrator for every 10 databases, our ratio is 1 to 40.

And we also now have better real-time information, which enables better decision-making. Understanding our customers' purchase history and requests for support allows us to market our products better and provide better service."


The Oracle Customer Data Hub identifies and reconciles duplicate data, cleans the data, and sends it back to the source systems in near real time. Two additional components, Oracle Customers Online and Oracle Data Librarian, provide customer management, viewing, consolidation, and data quality tools.


Opening Up the Enterprise
Because the Oracle Customer Data Hub is built on an open information architecture, the Oracle Customer Data Hub can be used with applications from other vendors such as SAP, Sage Group, and Lawson Software.