The interesting thing about a root canal is that while everyone approaches the procedure with trepidation, it’s actually not that bad.  And once the process is over with, you feel so much better.  What tends to be overlooked is that the pain associated with a root canal is really about the bad tooth that hurts so much before you go in to get it fixed.

The same can be said for bad data.  It’s like an abscess that radiates throughout the organization, leading to lost orders, missed shipments, irreversible deductions, and grouchy executives – tell me those things aren’t painful!  Yet many companies are horrified by the idea that they should engage in a data clean up effort.  If you compare it to a root canal, first of all you’ll get a few chuckles from the cross-functional team, and then you can point out my astute observation that all the pain is actually already going on.  That if you engage in a data quality initiative, it would actually be a lot less painful, and in the end, when the data is clean and continues to be monitored, corporate life can become a state of near-bliss (okay, well that’s probably stretching it a bit).

The GXS community relies upon data to transact business all over the world.  Supply chain processes, the order to cash lifecycle, financial services transactions – they all share and consume large amounts of data.  Without the tools to ensure the integrity of the data, companies who implement electronic methods of communication are just subscribing to the now oft-spoken adage of “garbage in, garbage out FASTER.”  I am certainly not an advocate of this, but I will tell you that it takes partnering by all of the parties involved in efforts to improve supply chain efficiency – the manufacturers, suppliers, software providers, and retailers.  The attempt to achieve the exchange of accurate and up to date information does not happen passively.  It requires digging to the “root” of the problem, rather than just putting band-aids on the symptoms.  Similarly, motrin is a wonderful pain reliever for a toothache, but the pain comes shooting back 4 to 6 hours later – hence the reason the root canal is the only viable long-term solution.

I recently read an article about one apparel manufacturer that saw a drastic reduction in their compliance charges.  By creating a team of people to manage issues internally, to assess inter-organization challenges, and to partner with key customers, they achieved incredible gains.  The clip doesn’t reference any trips to the dentist, but I am pretty sure the participants could at least concede I might be partially right in comparing their efforts to that dreaded trip to the dental chair!

I strolled into an airport convenience store the other day to purchase a candy bar, a vice I only allow myself when traveling.  Perhaps it’s unfortunate that I travel a lot, but this justification allows me to sleep at night.

Anyway, I happened to walk up to the register just as the cashier was celebrating just having sold four 256MB USB memory sticks.  The two management employees conversing with her were amazed that a passenger had bought such a large quantity, but the cashier said, “well, they were $5.99 – you don’t see a deal like that every day.”  The discussion quickly turned from celebratory to disastrous (keep in mind I am standing at the register waiting to pay $2 for a candy bar this whole time – gradually feeling more and more ashamed that I’m even in the place).  The cashier grabbed one of the remaining items hanging on the wall and flipped it over to look at the price sticker, which stated “$59.99”.  Oops!  Someone, in their zeal to finish tagging the memory stick boxes with price stickers and move on to more exciting products (like Butterfinger Crisp candy bars), forgot a ‘9’ – and what a faux pas that turned out to be!

I won’t go on to tell the rest of the story, as it became sad watching the cashier argue that she just did her job and rang the items up at the price that was stuck on the back.  By this time they finally realized they needed to get me out of the store before continuing and so finally took my money and relinquished me to go off and eat my way into a state of chocolate-peanut butter bliss.  Of course, by this time I had lost interest in the candy and rather wanted to ponder what led to such a terrible hit to this little store’s profitability.  Was it the fact that instead of linking the barcode on the package to an electronically-stored price in the computer system, someone was relying on one clerk to properly tag the item using a manual pricing gun, and another clerk to properly enter the price when ringing up the item?  Or was it that the manual process at point-of-sale was the result of incomplete or inaccurate data provided to the store by the memory stick manufacturer?

You see, I like these little retail mysteries.  Because they make clear the everyday examples of why data quality and data synchronization are so important.  If a manufacturer can provide pricing electronically when sending the product information to the retailer, linking the UPC number to the price, the retailer can then flow this data automatically to their point-of-sale system, use scanning equipment to scan the UPC, and see the price come up for them, rather than each of these steps being handled manually.  GXS is in the business of providing services to help customers gather data, audit it for accuracy, transform it into electronic formats, and transmit it to trading partners – providing visibility throughout the process, and ensuring that what arrived at the end was intended and intact.  This is a fascinating concept.  Creating efficiency in the exchange of business documents.  Okay, maybe it’s not awe-inspiring to you.  But it’s certainly clear to me why it’s so mission-critical.  Because when a customer goes to buy a leather cover for their handheld PDA, and ends up receiving an IBM server instead (a story relayed to me by a colleague which has P&L problems that reach far beyond my memory stick example), the consumer may win, but the retailer certainly doesn’t.  And you can believe that the manufacturer will feel the upstream effects of that as a reduction in future purchase orders.  So, how much is bad data costing you?