Customer Success Story - Schwarz IT

The challenge

Schwarz Group, one of the global top retail groups, covers the entire value cycle, from production and retail to disposal and recycling.

Despite operating in 32 countries worldwide, the companies of Schwarz Group managed to centralize their system landscape while sustainably improving business partner data quality.

With the strong focus on cross-division value, Schwarz IT - the Group’s digital transformation enabler - aimed for more optimization in business processes, especially in the risk management context.

Automated system checks already proved to outperform traditional communication channels and manual efforts in other data quality endeavours, which reassured Schwarz IT to enhance risk safety for the entire group further with CDQ services.

Experience

The companies of Schwarz Group aimed to improve VAT validation, a critical process that demands precision and efficiency.

Transition from the cumbersome checks of VAT information in separate windows to a system-integrated one-click approach, covering EU VAT IDs, SIRET numbers, as well as Czech, Polish and Swiss tax numbers yields not only time savings.

An extensive CDQ toolbox available to Schwarz Group users via self-service, combines the best of communication and automation.

With 70+ external data sources and more than 2300 data quality rules, it empowers users to optimize, protect and leverage data as a corporate asset across the data lifecycle for the entire group with confidence.

VAT check integration was well received across the organization, with multiple divisions anticipating its benefits in terms of speed.

The results

With integrated VAT checks at business partner creation, Schwarz IT realized a reduction of approximately 3 minutes per record, while for business partner changes the gains were even more substantial, with around 15 minutes saved.

These time savings not only improved operational efficiency but also increased the satisfaction of the internal teams who no longer have to engage in tedious, manual processes.

With the implementation of VAT validation, 2,000 hours are saved annually in business partner maintenance, and another 1,100 hours in savings come with rule-based deduplication.

Having experienced the power of internal data sharing, Schwarz IT is looking to implement more services offered by CDQ and leverage the power of collaborative master data management with the trusted CDQ Data Sharing Community.