Customer Story
Porsche ensures uncompromising data quality in mySAP™ CRM system
15x
faster at data cleansing
36,000+
employees
1931
company founded
Overview
Luxury sports car manufacturer gets the most from its global customer relationship management software investment by ensuring uncompromising data quality.
The brand name Porsche is famous worldwide. From the 1930s when Ferdinand Porsche founded the Porsche Engineering Office in Stuttgart through the launches of various Porsche models—the very first 356, the 956, the 911 Carrera to the much heralded Boxster—Porsche embodies fascination, power, quality, style, and action. Innovation and emotion is epitomised by all Porsche vehicles. At Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG, its guiding principle of keeping up with the pace of tomorrow by accelerating today demands creativity, competence and concentration knowledge that has been developed over generations.
Good Customer Rapport
Car dealers are quite particular in their demand for marketing and sales support, especially in Germany. To support them and ensure effective customer communications, the company commenced a four-year global migration of its customer relationship management (CRM) processes to SAP. A dedicated team at the company’s German headquarters is progressing swiftly to provide access to Porsche subsidiaries around the world.
While the German dealerships now have significant exposure to Porsche’s mySAP™ CRM system, Germany was not the first to benefit. That accolade goes to Porsche Cars North America – and for two reasons. First, North America and Canada represent the biggest market for the car manufacturer; almost 40 percent of all luxury cars are sold there. Second, the orientation of the pilot project towards a non-German market prevented a focus that is too German-centric. Porsche’s mySAP CRM implementation provides a customer information hub, with data being sourced from many applications. Roadside assistance, customer service, warranty programme and marketing information applications feed-in, as well as data from in-car systems. Customer histories can be viewed, supporting optimal customer care as well as effective marketing programmes.
Industry
Automobile/Retail
Challenge
To globally roll out customer relationship management (CRM) to worldwide dealers and partners, and append, consolidate and standardize customer records with correct name and address information, in the right language, for every country of its operations.
Solution
Results
Consolidated and standardized data formats and data quality across all back end customer services, roadside assistance, and warranty systems. As a result, Porsche improved support for worldwide dealers, ensured effective customer communication, and secured increased brand loyalty.
“With data quality being managed successfully, nothing now stands in the way of the Porsche CRM.”
CRM Project Manager
Data Quality
Given the many third-party applications from which data is sourced, a significant challenge to winning a good return on investment from mySAP CRM at Porsche was how to trace accurately and match a customer’s multiple records, so they could be merged into a Single Customer View. Porsche knew that data formats and data quality varied across systems. The company recognised these issues would inhibit matching, threatening its CRM objectives. Given the volume of data involved, Porsche sought an automated data quality solution.
For Porsche’s mySAP CRM implementation, the company needed to select a data quality solution able to append customer records with correct name and address information, in the right language, for every country of its operations around the world. The solution would also need to be smart enough to handle local nuances in name and address structures and multinational complexities, such as the Spanish often having a second surname and customers in the US moving home frequently.
It would have been quite an effort for them to have used a different data quality tool for each country. SAP certification was another of our indispensable requirements. Porsche was pleased to have found in Precisely Trillium a global solution supporting customer information data quality for any country in the world, and that is certified for mySAP CRM. In fact, Trillium Quality is able to detect data structures, apply proper formatting and if applicable, cleanse the data some 10 to 15 times faster than is required for SAP certification. This is because the tool generates reference tables which allows for the comparison of individual records via indexes instead of comparing each record with another record.
Trillium Quality offers multiple configuration options to meet specific requirements. For instance, Porsche can adjust the strictness of matching rules for detecting duplicates. Matching rules might be too tight where the software doesn’t match on slight deviations in say, the spelling of “Julius Mayr”, “Julius Meier” and “Julius Maier”. Rules would be too loose, however, if the tool began matching significant variations such as Juliane, Juli, Julia, Jule in the German towns of Augsburg, Cologne, Hamburg, Essen, Munich, Krefeld, Saarbrücken and Wismar.
It’s in defining matching rules that the expertise of Precisely Professional Services comes into play. Porsche has worked closely with Precisely in Germany and in the USA.
Looking good
Today, Trillium Quality validates, updates and qualifies customer and address data either overnight, when other systems submit the information in batch runs, or in real-time when customer data is first entered. When Porsche or its subsidiaries or dealerships search for a customer in mySAP CRM, Trillium Quality for SAP acts almost invisibly to ensure a full and accurate record is presented. Millions of records are searched in less than a second. Porsche’s team implemented the North American mySAP CRM pilot in just ten months. The subsequent roll-outs to subsidiaries in other countries is happening quickly, closely spaced, sometimes in parallel.
With data quality being managed successfully, nothing now stands in the way of the Porsche CRM roll-out. Indeed the system has received such high levels of acceptance that markets not yet in the planning phase ask impatiently: “When can we have it?”
Trillium Quality
Rapidly transform high-volume, disconnected data into trusted and actionable business insights with scalable enterprise data quality