A review of the reference data
Duplicates, empty mandatory fields, inconsistency in names and units.
The tools are secondary here. Everything rests on organisation: every list has a specific employee answerable for its condition.
Duplicates, empty mandatory fields, inconsistency in names and units.
How a name is written, which fields are mandatory, who is allowed to create new records.
We merge them so the documents do not lose their link to the right record.
A specific person is responsible for each list, not an abstract department.
Validation that stops a duplicate being created or a mandatory field being skipped.
A cleanliness summary: how many new duplicates appeared, where the empty fields are.
The review takes a week or two. The clean-up itself depends on the volume and usually stretches over several months in stages.
We count the duplicates and the records filled in against the rules.
We agree the wording with the people who actually fill the lists in, rather than issuing an order from above.
We merge the duplicates in turn, starting with those that distort the reporting.
Validation at entry and a regular report on data cleanliness.
Removing duplicates without introducing rules is pointless. Within six months they will be back: a manager will fail to find an existing record and create a new one. Rules and validation at entry first, the clean-up afterwards. Otherwise the whole job has to be done twice.
Because finding an existing record is harder than creating a new one. A person searches for a familiar name, fails to find it because of a stray quotation mark or space, and creates another record. The cure is decent search and a ban on creating a record without checking first.
Finding suspicious pairs, yes, a machine can do that. Merging them is better done by eye: similar names do not always mean the same organisation, and wrongly merged records will muddle the document links for good.
The assessment takes a few days, while the time to tidy up is set by the volume. A partner list of several thousand entries takes more than a week to work through, but it can be done without stopping current work, moving from active counterparties to archived ones.
Tell us which reports disagree and which lists look neglected. As a first step we will assess the scale of the mess.
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