Integrating Disparate Data Sources
Most companies already have valuable customer and prospect data that they have accumulated over time. Marketing warehouses often contain third party prospect and overlay information as well as proprietary, in-house customer data; each has its own records layouts and formats. Usually the data resides on large mainframe computers, or arrives in the form of tapes. To guarantee standardization and uniqueness, new files have to undergo a sanitization and deduping process.
The typical Data Warehouse has many different types of data, such as accounting system files or customer service files. Often the departments feeding data into the data warehouse are on different machines with different operating systems, record layouts, etc. Unless you integrate this kind of information with your marketing data, you don't really have an effective Marketing Warehouse system. To establish a 1:1 marketing relationship with customers and prospects, it is important to be able to merge that third party data with existing in-house data in ways that ensure no data redundancy.
Important questions about handling new data arise such as, "How do you insure new data is standardized and valid? How do you eliminate redundancy? How do you integrate the data into the database? And how do you do all this without having to write costly software?" Herein lies the drawback with the commercially available tools. No single vendor combines RDBMS software with data migration and database loading tools -- until now.
Recognizing the critical need for data sanitization and integration, Mercantile Software has developed a sophisticated Data Loader module to perform these crucial functions. Other DSS suppliers leave you to do your own research and integration of whatever package you may find. The ability to sanitize and dedup incoming records is incorporated as a standard utility within the IRE(TM) Marketing Warehouse.
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