Customer Success Story - Nestlé

The challenge

With more than 1 billion products sold everyday all over the world by thousands of retailers in very local markets, the resulting sheer amount of customer data makes it an imperative for Nestlé to look for the best possible Data Quality as a Service solutions.

Although SAP MDG was deployed as central governance tool globally, many regional processes, IT solutions, and an overall insufficient level of data quality were the reasons to head for a centralized, more automated customer and vendor master data management.

Within a three-year timeframe, Nestlé Business Centers (Shared Service Centers) were introduced and mandated to manage the basic level of enrichment, validation and approval procedures, as well as to lead important data hygiene activities. In parallel, standardization increased in business processes such as order-to-cash, source-topay and record-to-report.

The experience

Aiming to make master data available faster and in better quality, the next step was higher degree of automation.

For that, Nestlé introduced common standardized tools to simplify master data end-to-end processes, enable less handovers, make use of CDQ data quality reports for continuous improvement, and apply data quality best practices.

To enhance the level of automation in data collection, premium data from the CDQ sharing pool, such as addresses and tax IDs, was applied. In addition, 600 derivation rules were employed for Nestlé-specific sales, procurement, and accounting data via the MDG BRF+ framework, resulting in a significant reduction in customer and vendor lifecycle lead-time.

The global data governance strategy and CDQ tools enabled the creation of a trusted, duplicate-free, complete customer record within less than a day, as opposed to initial timeframe of 6-7 days. At the same time, associated risks as well as data maintenence costs dropped.

The results

Along with increased speed, quality did grow substantially: customers records landed at 90% data quality rate and vendors even at 95%.

Thanks to an impressive 90% of all new entries passing as “first time right”, transaction costs were reduced by more than 14% making it also a financial success.

More than 6 Million records of customers and vendors in the system could be easily deactivated thus reducing operational risk. For even more safety, Nestlé joined the CDQ Fraud Prevention Alliance to stay ahead of payment fraud.

This powerful success story shows another important aspect that clean, high quality data can bring to an organization: employee satisfaction. Of almost 200 users interviewed on their experience with the CDQ-MDG Integration, 91,3% net promoter score was achieved showing the usefulness to the end user in business processes.