As part of a large M&A integration programme Acuma were asked to provide both a strategy review of the migration approach and to deliver a comprehensive analysis of customer data quality across both gas and electricity brands, focused on the core areas of:

• Billing
• VAT & CCL (Climate Change Levy)
• Meter portfolio comparisons with the industry
• Prepayment metering
• Telephone number and name and address details

The analysis needed to be achieved in-line with a challenging migration schedule and the drive to significantly reduce the ‘cost to serve’ and maintain a high quality customer service experience for their customers.

Combining both industry and data quality improvement expertise Acuma worked closely with the customer team to deliver a strategy and roadmap assessment followed by a comprehensive data quality analysis.

The study rapidly identified the need for specialist support in understanding the scale and impact of poor quality data, prior to migrating customers. To respond rapidly and minimise cost, such as infrastructure, Acuma’s offsite solution centre capability was exploited. The solution centre provided a scaleable, secure and rapidly available environment to manage the large volumes of customer master data and billing information. For the data analysis a specialist data profiling tool combined with standard database tools was used.This integrated solution enabled extensive data profiling against complex business rules to be performed.

The result was a comprehensive understanding of the potential data quality issues; their appropriate resolution by the customer’s technical and business teams; and the successful migration of the acquired customers.