Data cleaning

Lisette Wingelaar

Modified on: Thu, 18 Apr, 2024 at 3:40 PM

With the Evolution Program in full swing, the Team is receiving multiple inquiries on how you can prepare for the new systems. This article addresses this by outlining how to clean your data, the best approach, and the most valuable, to preparation that you and your team need to start now.

When migrating data to the new systems, data from our current systems will need to be matched and merged. In order for matching to be successful, the tool/software used requires two identifiers to match in order to merge the identified records. For example, for a client record, an identifier is an email address, phone number, address, or full name.

What is data cleaning?

Data is one of the most valuable things you have in your business as it informs business decisions, allows you to communicate and market to your clients and it empowers you to prepare for the future.

For data to be useful, it needs to be “clean” – the process of ensuring data is readable by the system and easily accessible and usable for your teams.

As we introduce the new systems in this next exciting phase of our Evolution journey we will be merging and deduplicating data from multiple systems (Netsuite, NextService, Vital). To ensure the process runs smoothly you all need to have “clean” data.

Why do we need to clean data?

Having clean data offers a whole host of benefits to your business, including:

Creating a single source of truth for all client information
Increasing the effectiveness of your marketing and communications
Enhancing the accuracy of your business reporting
Streamlining business processes (i.e. less-frustrated employees)

Fortunately, Pooltrackr has data cleaning tools that will be used in the “cleaning” process (i.e. deduplication, mapping, and merging). However, even the best tools in the world can’t do everything. The concept of “garbage in, garbage out” applies here. The cleaner your data is going into the process the less manual work will be required of you during the implementation of the new systems – the work starts now.

Your task

You and your team need to start cleaning all the different types of data in the system. We have outlined how best to begin the cleaning for each dataset, but the most important focus for you today is your Client data. If you have the additional capacity you can then move on to cleaning the client-associated data (assets, equipment) and then records later addressed in the Evolution Program.

The Evolution Team held a data cleaning session to direct your efforts and talk through the client data cleaning process. If you were unable to attend you can access the recording here.

Records to focus on

We have created mapping references to assist you in understanding how certain data is mapped, these can be found below: