Improving Data Quality and Governance
Challenge
Dale Farm is the largest UK farmer-owned dairy cooperative, with operations throughout the UK and Ireland, employing over 1200 people at 8 locations. They manufacture an expansive range of award-winning products for the retail, food service and food ingredient markets, distributing to over 40 export markets across the globe.
Seeking to innovate and improve a number of their operational processes, Dale Farm sought a technology provider to address the data quality issues they were encountering. The organisation wished to establish a data quality baseline score for a range of priority datasets; quantify both the financial and nonfinancial benefits of addressing gaps in data quality; implement a data ownership and governance model to drive accountability and responsibility for data quality within the organisation; and implement a data quality KPI dashboard to track progress and improvements in data quality over the longer term.
Solution
Analytics Engines held several workshops with key stakeholders at Dale Farm, whilst also analysing the organisation’s databases to identify specific data quality issues. From this initial analysis, we identified several key issues that were preventing the organisation from maximising value from their data. We found that portions of the organisation’s data were held offline, leading to inaccurate reporting. In addition, we found that manual data entry often resulted in incorrect, missing, and misconfigured values, while overly permissive user permissions resulted in data being deleted. Combined, these factors lead to a general lack of trust in the data and its ability to accurately inform critical business decisions.
Impact
Following this analysis, we produced a report that provided Dale Farm with insights into the current status of their data quality and made recommendations around a data governance model that the organisation could adopt. To enable Dale Farm to monitor data quality and governance on an ongoing basis, we also created a dashboard that provides real-time insight into specific data quality and governance issues.
As a result of this partnership, Dale Farm have been able to create a clear roadmap for addressing their data quality and governance issues and have been able to clearly establish ownership for data management, ensuring that data quality and governance are maintained on an ongoing basis. Lasting value doesn’t come from supplier‑customer transactions. It comes from partnerships that treat data as a living asset – one that needs attention, transparency and collaboration long after the first engagement ends.
