Whether through acquisitions or just modifications to legacy systems made over a period of years, mature companies inevitably run into data integration and quality problems. These issues are becoming particularly pronounced in the age of analytics, when companies need to pull data from sources that may number in the hundreds. When formats and fields are inconsistent, analysis becomes all but impossible.

Talend Inc. makes data integration software that’s used by companies around the world. The company recently connected us with two European retail customers who explained how data integration is boosting their businesses. They showed how clean data can pay off in multiple ways.

SEO windfall for home supply retailer

Travis Perkins plc serves professional builders and do-it-yourself homeowners through more than 2,100 retail outlets spread across the U.K. Thanks to a series of acquisitions, it has amassed a catalog of more than a half million items, but they were held captive in isolated databases and enterprise resource planning systems that in some cases dated to the early 1990s or were based on the Pick operating system.

Going online was a turning point. The company had to pull together all of those information sources into a unified online catalog hosted by the Hybris AG product management catalog. That meant going through the entire inventory to meticulously fill in missing information and standardize formats.

It was a big job. For example, the website needed to display detailed descriptions for each product, but the descriptions held in legacy systems were sometimes truncated or even non-existent. Measurements were also inconsistent. Some used the feet and inches of the imperial system while others were metric. And as with any large catalog, some information had simply been left out or filled in incorrectly.

The result was lost sales opportunities. “If someone was searching for a kitchen tap, they might not find what they wanted on our Wickes site because the word ‘kitchen taps’ wasn’t in all the product descriptions,” said Group Data Director David Todd. Talend was enlisted to comb through records and identify gaps according to a set of filters Travis Perkins defined. Product descriptions were ranked according to the amount of work they required, with the neediest records getting attention first. Talend was also able to identify missing information as well as inconsistencies in areas like metrics, categories and spelling.

Fixing the errors remains a mostly manual process, but the normalized and expanded product descriptions had a large and immediate payoff in search engine traffic. That’s resulted in a 30 percent year-over-year boost in online sales through the Wickes site alone. “For example, if you search Google.co.uk for ‘door,’ Wickes now comes up first,” Todd said. You can imagine how much incremental traffic that generates.

The conversion rate – or the percentage of website visitors who actually become paying customers – is also way up. Todd attributes much of the boost directly to the improved descriptions. “People are finding the product they want, the data is richer and they can more easily make a decision,” he said.

So far, Travis Perkins has only moved about one-quarter of its product catalog online, but the early results have left no doubt that the effort is worth it. Next up is a site for professional builders.

Otto GmbH seeks smart marketing edge

Although little-known in the U.S., Otto GmbH is an e-commerce giant that does $18 billion in business across more than 20 countries, mostly in Europe. The company is in the process of building what it expects will be a world-class business intelligence platform that will integrate near-real-time, real-time and historical data to deliver recommendations on the spot to online shoppers.

The company was looking for a data integration platform that was quick and easy to install and configure and had plenty of customization options, said Rupert Steffner, chief BI platform architect of Otto Group. It was also important that the software be open-source. “We want community as well as service,” Steffner said. “What was important was not so much the pricing but the ability for us to develop and build upon it. “

Otto had Talend up and running within three weeks. The availability of a rich pool of developers was a plus. Talend now provides data integration across Otto’s entire platform and serves as the middleware that retrieves data from a variety of sources and distributes it through APIs, Steffner said. “It helps us make quicker and smarter decisions about product lines, forecast more accurately, reduce overstocks and tackle such knotty problems as shopping cart abandonment and customer churn,” he said. “It will play an integral role as we move to using Apache Spark to fill our Customer360 profile based on HBase.”

Although the BI system is still a work-in-progress, Steffner said there’s no doubt Talend can bridge the gap between data in legacy, batch systems and the real-time world of e-commerce and significantly reduce the industry-wide problem of abandoned shopping carts.

Photo by Graham Richardson via Flickr