CHAPTER 3
Controlling Costs with Accurate and Reliable Data
Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.
—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW
Are you making the most of your corporate expenditures? Estimates show that 10 to 20 percent of an organization’s revenue is lost due to added expenses resulting from poor data management practices. A good data foundation impacts many different areas of cost control including:
• IT modernization
• Spend analysis
• Supply chain optimization
• Inventory management
• Order to cash optimization
• Marketing cost reduction
• Business process automation
Are your expenses where they need to be?
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REMEMBER
1. Data quality and data governance should never be considered a one-time project. A quality culture must be established as an ongoing, continuous process.
2. No organization can tackle enterprise-wide data quality and data governance all at once. To be successful, your journey must be evolutionary. Start small and take achievable steps that can be measured along the way.
Similar to Benjamin Franklin’s quote on page 31, most executives understand that small leaks can damage their company. The most difficult task, however, is figuring out where the leaks are, plugging them, and doing it all before the ship sinks. Just as we saw with risk mitigation, data quality plays a huge role in cost control. Data quality can improve customer-facing ...

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