A $500 million annual spend client with 10 offices globally between North America, Europe and Africa came to Grasp Technologies in 2015 with the challenge of data consolidation of sets for global reporting. Each of the client’s offices operated separately and had their own back office system setups and GDS setups.
Nothing was congruent across any of the entities. None of the data was mapped to the same fields, even for shared clients between offices. The GDS codes were all different as well as even shared client codes in the back offices were different. Same with UDIDS, remarks, etc. Additionally, the North American Group (4 offices) had changed back office systems 3 times in the last 3 years. They never once converted their data. So they each had 3 historical databases for different periods of time, again with nothing mapped the same or even the same between systems after switching to the new back office databases. Basically, they had a bunch of data in the “ether” somewhere and could not historically show anything being done for clients or their businesses over time.
Grasp Technologies Data Consolidation
How did Grasp Technologies help? We started with North America and used GraspSECURECONNECT to sync data from all the historical back office databases for each entity and consolidate it, map it, normalize, etc. between the different data sets, so each entity would finally have a historical database. We then took that consolidated database and consolidated it with the new active back office database. From there, we lined/mapped everything up and for the first time, the client in North American was able to report across all their data going back 3 years for each entity. From there, we took the 4 “master consolidated” databases and consolidated them so that the North American management could have one instance in which to view all of their data in the Grasp Data Reporting/BI solution.
We created custom syncs just for this client to ensure accuracy. The client also had us consolidating their GDS data from about 50 PCC’s across the group and doing the same thing into one rolled up instance. In the end, each North American entity, now had an accurate reporting instance with 3 years of history for the entity and all their clients. Management was able to log into one place and see data in every way you could possibly think of from totals across all entities all the way down to a specific traveler of one client of one entity.
Next in line…
Europe had the same data consolidation problem as North America, although slightly less difficult, as the entities had not changed systems 3 times in 3 years and left the data. We setup each of Europe’s 6 entities for its own version of GraspDATA for reporting and then consolidated all of them into one master Europe instance for European management. Again, none of the agencies used the same codes or mapped their data congruently, so they were all over the place. Grasp Technologies wrote custom syncs for each entity, normalized the data, and brought it all together with 100% accuracy to each data source.
Bringing it all together
The final step was the merge of North America and Europe into one master “global consolidated instance”. Again, Grasp had to map all of the data from Europe’s data sets with North America’s including the historical data. This is where Grasp Technologies’ proprietary optimized data structure in the GraspSECURECONNECT data engine really helped out. As a result, now the senior leadership can log into one instance and look in on any transaction happening in any entity at any time globally. And we are syncing all of this data across 30 databases, each and every single day, so the data is almost real time!
The client now has the ability get the data they need to negotiate global contracts for their company and manage their business in ways they never imagined from an efficiency and effectiveness standpoint.
