Vodafone Ireland deploys ATHANOR

Dateline: 2 February 2005

Vodafone, Ireland’s leading mobile phone operator has implemented Similarity Systems’ Data Quality management solution, ATHANOR™, to standardize, cleanse and validate customer and subscriber information for its core NCR Teradata marketing data warehouse. Vodafone’s data warehouse is a 1.5 terabyte repository managing all customer information for the company.

The solution also facilitates compliance with important regulatory responsibilities by providing high quality data for a national directory enquiry database.

At Vodafone the argument for deploying ATHANOR™ was obvious; the company had no desire to mail expensive marketing materials to undeliverable or duplicate addresses. The choice was whether to continue with outsourcing the solution or to tackle Data Quality in-house. Vodafone opted to deploy Similarity Systems’ ATHANOR as it provides for a fully automated Data Quality solution, enables faster turn-around of cleansed data files and strengthens the organization’s ability to define targeted marketing campaigns.

Vodafone also sees an imminent return on its investment that will reduce the annual cost of its Data Quality effort to less than one third the cost of its previous outsourced solution.

“By implementing ATHANOR as the infrastructure for maintaining high quality data in-house, we can ensure that our marketing materials reach our target audience without unnecessary duplication or waste. With this solution we have also dramatically reduced the cost of managing our marketing data assets.” said Dorothy Kelly, head of customer insights at Vodafone. “Being able to deploy the same solution to standardize the directory enquiry information we provide to the telecommunications regulatory authority also has significant benefits for us as an organization.”

“Most large organizations find they need to manage Data Quality at multiple points across the enterprise,” said Garry Moroney, chief executive officer at Similarity Systems. “Moving towards a single best-of-breed solution such as ATHANOR enables them to implement a standardized approach to achieving high-quality data that has all the advantages of reuse, quality control and centralized management.”

Organizations such as Vodafone understand that operating with poor quality data costs money and leads to ineffective marketing, bad business decisions and poor customer relationship management. In the past, enterprises, including Vodafone, had little choice but to outsource the task of cleansing, matching and enriching data at considerable cost and with varying degrees of success. Similarity Systems’ ATHANOR enables enterprises to take control of their Data Quality requirements in-house, reducing cost and providing the basis for company-wide Data Quality improvements.

The Vodafone Data Quality solution is based on a number of ATHANOR Designer Data Quality workbench seats, which are used by data analysts to implement Data Quality business rules using ATHANOR’s easy-to-use graphical user interface. The Data Quality rules are deployed as batch processes with ATHANOR Runtime, to perform daily, weekly and monthly cleansing routines on Vodafone’s marketing and directory enquiry data as required.

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