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Services : Database Design, Technologies, Support, ETL, Monitoring, Performance Tuning, Warehousing
Many companies suffer from venders or clients providing inconvenient or even corrupted data. Though this may be the client's or vender's fault, the company is often liable for the inaccuracies. Even internal transfers of data between different systems or departments can be problematic, both the sender and the receiver claiming the other should adjust. By serving as an intermediary, we ensure that business is not delayed or derailed by faulty information while protecting the relationship between the sender and receiver. Our analysts combine a stringent QA process with experience and custom data tools in order to verify and improve the validity of your data. Because of our experience, we can almost always perform this service for a price lower than if you did it internally. Some of our services are listed below.
T E C H N I C A L P L A N N I N GWe take care of questions such as: When should we expect the data? Where will it come from? How often will it be updated? How soon is it needed? How should the data be formatted? By taking care of these questions early, we ensure that both parties are aware what is expected. With all important questions answered and prepared for, your company is ready to proceed with a stable process, which will not likely have surprises or disappointments later on.
N O T I F I C A T I O NWe help both sides stay on top of the process by providing feedback when things don't go to plan, or even when they do. Has the data arrived? How did the load go? Why did these errors occur? These are all questions that should be answered before they even get asked. We will provide notification to you and any other parties you specify whenever: data is late, data arrives, processing begins, data is delivered, or errors occur. Just because you are not handling the data doesn't mean you shouldn't always know its status. We provide answers. We ensure your required data is never forgotten about.
F O R M A T T R A N S L A T I O NOne of the most common needs for ETL comes from formatting data. No one wants to have to tell a client they need them to resend the data because the fields are in the wrong order, but no one wants to take the time to rearrange them either. We ensure that the data you receive is always in the format most easily used by you. For repetitive jobs, we even perform automation to improve our response time and save you money.
If you are given too few or too many files, we will get you what you need. We will do aggregation, filtering, or any number of other relational data analysis to turn what you get into what you need.
We can take any format and convert it into any format. Whether it be fixed width, delimited, Excel, Access, SQL, or others, we will ensure that you receive your data in a format you can use. We can provide headers, footers, filenames, or sort orders.
Field formatting is a good way to improve the quality of your data and your operations. Probably everyone has seen a computer system that claims a person's phone number is "Jake". By applying formatting rules appropriate for each type of data, not only do we save space in your database, but we give you an accurate picture of where your data needs improvement. Take a phone number for example. We remove all characters that are not numbers. We check that the phone number is 10 digits long (depending on the situation) and that it does not start with 911, 411, or a number of other potentially damaging or expensive fake numbers. Also, by standardizing formatting characters and capitalization, we improve your matching and aggregating ability.
We can take the validation of your data one step further by verifying its accuracy. For example, 32222 may be a valid format for a ZIP code, but is it a real one? Without verifying against a national list, you couldn't be sure. Verification of names, addresses, phone numbers, and other information is one more step to save you the expense of mailing advertisements that will never be read, paying someone to place a call to a number that doesn't exist, or doing business with someone not using their real name.
We can translate to or from codes to ensure that you can interpret the information you are given. For example, if you receive data that says a person's gender is "1", what does that mean? Codes are often used without explanation. We find the explanations and ensure that what you receive is something you can use.
Removing duplicate records can be difficult when the data is incomplete, but we apply our years of experience to do this accurately and effectively. For example, determining whether a person is listed more than once is often difficult now that social security numbers are being used less frequently. Duplicating a person in your records can waste mailing, inflate profits, duplicate shipping or billing, create extra phone calls, or a number of other errors which can result in expensive data clean-up later on and embarrassment for the company. We have a great deal of experience using matching algorithms on even sub-standard data.
In order to protect you, your customers, and your data for the sake of privacy and legality, we provide the cutting edge of encryption to protect your data. We also ensure that the data you receive is decrypted and ready to use.
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