Fight against duplicates

Duplicates in SAP databases lead to invoices being sent twice or payments being incorrectly assigned. Redundant customer inquiries about the same case also trigger many manual processes and lead to long processing times.

670,000 letters and e-mails per year

Patrick Mathieu is familiar with this problem. He is Head of IT Business Support Services at Billag, the Swiss equivalent of the German "ARD ZDF Deutschlandradio Beitragsservice" (formerly GEZ) and the Austrian GIS.

"Billag sends out 4.4 million invoices, one million reminders and 54,000 debt collection notices per year. We also receive 670,000 letters and emails and 450,000 phone calls per year"

explains Mathieu.

Customers often contacted Billag with the same request in quick succession via several channels, e.g. first by letter and then again by email. Billag then addressed this and other optimization potential as part of a project programme that ran from October 2012 to April 2014.

"One of the aims of the program was to simplify the IT architecture and customer communication. One important step was early customer recognition"

says Mathieu.

Billag used MDACS, a product from GTW Management Consulting, for this purpose. GTW also supported the overall project with two consultants.

The Master Data Consolidation Suite (MDACS) is a software for master data quality and customer identification and functions as a central module within SAP. Processes that were previously manual now run fully automatically - and therefore faster, explains Christian Philipp, Partner at GTW.

Multiple contacts can now also be identified and merged more easily. MDACS recognizes duplicates despite write errors and variants with high performance in large databases.

"Imagine, for example, a customer registers with Rafael Martin Gonzalez via the Internet portal.

Then he sends an e-mail with the name Martin Rafael Gonzalez. It is also possible that an employee on the phone writes Gonzales with an s when entering the name, for example"

Philipp gives an example.

Different spellings of addresses are also often a stumbling block, e.g. "Prinz Eugen Str." vs. "Prinz-Eugen-Straße".

"Multilingualism was particularly challenging in the Swiss market"

says Philipp.

SAP FI-CA

MDACS was installed on the SAP FI-CA environment and connected to the customer self-service portal, a scanning solution and a workflow solution via interfaces.

Before the introduction of MDACS, master data existed in three places in the Billag system landscape (in the e-mail response system, in the workflow tool and in the billing hub).

All master data is now only stored in the GTW Billing Hub and is retrieved from there. The data stocks of no less than eight million data records were checked for duplicates using a high-performance mass run (FI-CA-specific).

MDACS is also used during ongoing operations and prevents new duplicates directly during data entry and customer creation. Overall, Billag was able to reduce its outstanding customer inquiries by 80 percent within six months and improve the quality of its master data.

"This means significantly less work for Billag"

says Mathieu.

Multiple contacts are avoided, customers are spared the hassle of incorrect or duplicate invoices and benefit from shorter response times.