Speed and Simplicity Required to Clean Property & People Data

Challenge

Due to the implementation of a new housing management system, Luton Borough Council required a powerful,  easy-to-use and an affordable data matching and data cleansing tool. Their old system spans various applications and the data can be many years old. The data entry systems for many of these older applications are, unfortunately, “free-text” based which causes huge issues with data quality. As such, whilst moving to a new system, as the data has to be ported to the new application, they wanted to cleanse and de-duplicate their properties and people data within the system.

Alan Kirk works within the Information Management Department and explains:

As with many systems, data quality is becoming ever more important and there is a push to get all data stored about properties, people and any other assets essentially in one place, or at least to have one definitive source. In the case of our property data, we consider our Corporate Gazetteer (LLPG) to be our definitive source for property data as it the most comprehensive, well organised and managed set of property data that we have. I have therefore been extracting all our property data from the various older housing applications and attempting to firstly de-duplicate them, then match them against the LLPG. One of the great qualities about WinPure Clean & Match has been it’s speed and simplicity for data importing and matching. Our LLPG currently has in the region of 98,000 records, and I can match a large dataset of 21,000 properties against this in under 30 seconds. This gives me the opportunity to easily clean up data which didn’t match and keep re-matching to see what remaining changes need to be made.

Solution

Alan Kirk and his team chose WinPure™ Clean & Match Enterprise, mainly due to its superior functionality over its peers, but also its competitively priced solution and easy to use interface.

Alan continues:

One of the great qualities about using WinPure™ has been it’s speed and simplicity for data importing and matching. Our LLPG currently has over 100,000 records, and we can match a large dataset of 21,000 properties against this in under 30 seconds.  With just a few clicks we were able to merge all the duplicated records into single rows without losing any of the important data which had been gathered over many years.

Benefits

• Best-in-Class Data Matching – As the world’s best data matching software, they were able to quickly find and remove all duplicated records across their systems in minutes rather than hours.
• User friendly – Visually oriented platform allowing Alan and his team to easily and quickly filter and customize the tool for their ease.