Case Study 1
Environmental health and safety system
Acuma were engaged to conduct a review of the existing environmental health and safety (EH&S) reporting process and infrastructure in order to ensure that it would meet the needs of the restructured business and that statutory reporting regulations would be satisfied.

Following on from the review Acuma were engaged to capture and analyse the detailed requirements for the development of a new EH&S reporting system.

Case Study 2
Environmental health and safety system
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.

Case Study 3
Asset management data quality
This regional water utility initiated a large project to build an asset management data warehouse. As an integral part of delivering the data warehouse, Acuma initiated a continuing programme of data quality improvement.

It was critical to the data warehouse project, that the data was both accurate and reliable. By first defining the appropriate data quality criteria, the quality of the data was measured (quantitatively and qualitatively), through an initial data quality audit. This analysis work identified where the data quality problems existed. Multiple data sources were analysed with row counts running into millions. Acuma consultants utilized best of breed tools to analyse the data. As well as data quality issues, referential integrity between data sources was also given particular attention. The outcome was that the utility was able to integrate data from a number of different sources into a data warehouse, having successfully dealt with any data quality issues beforehand. By combining the human and technical factors in the right way, Acuma not only helped improve data accuracy, but the utility has been able to tune their organisation and processes to ensure that the quality of their data is maintained in the future.