Case Study: helping to integrate two sets of customer data for Speedy Hire

When any large company acquires another, there are many issues to be addressed: two management teams, two sets of people, multiple offices, factories or branches that need to be integrated with one another. Both companies will invariably have been operating in their own way, have their own culture and ways of doing things. However, once the contract had been signed all these things had to be brought together.

When Speedy Hire (the No.1 in UK tool hire) took over Hewden Tools (the No.3), there were two different IT systems, and two different customer databases, with a combined total number of customers well into six figures. Clearly, because both firms operated in the same marketplace, Speedy knew that there would be considerable overlap. But establishing common clients is not as easy as it might first appear, and a prerequisite was ensuring that both databases conformed to a common standard. Here's where it got interesting. Over recent years Speedy had enjoyed a period of significant growth, taking on a large number of new customers. They therefore saw the imminent acquisition as a good opportunity not only to thoroughly clean the incoming data, but also to undertake some house-keeping on their own data first.

Crucial to any address-based database exercise that we undertake is ensuring, as far as possible, that all data conforms to a high standard in terms of the integrity of postal addresses. This is because it is simply impractical to begin any matching exercise where one or both of the data sets is not high quality. Examples of this could be something as simple as a postcode that does not match the address, eg. Halesowen G63, where the town + postcode was taken over the phone and keyed in, rather than being looked up in a state-of-the-art address checker and pasted in, in this example with a B63 postcode. We therefore ran a great many integrity checks on the main data, making corrections as necessary.

Once Hewden’s customer data became available we obviously subjected it to exactly the same processes to ensure that we would be comparing like-with-like. It then became much more straightforward to identify and flag duplicates across the two customer sets.

Commenting on the process, Speedy’s Group Data Manager said “One difficulty with this sort of project is that you can’t stop the clock. We first needed our data cleaned, then the data we had inherited, and finally we needed to establish the overlap, all in as short a timespan as possible. ABC fully understood what was required and responded to our needs both expeditiously and cost-effectively, and I would have no hesitation in using them again, or in recommending them for this type of project.”

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