Data Cleanse and Migration.

Data has a habit of growing in an unstructured and uncontrolled way over time. Whether you already have Salesforce or are about to switch across, making sure your data is in good shape is a fundamental element of success.

Data analysis

We can carry out a full analysis of your existing data. This involves reviewing each field to make sure we understand its purpose and how it will be replicated in Salesforce. We also review the quality of your data and assess the effort involved in transferring it over to Salesforce

Data clean up

We have lots of experience assisting organisations with the clean up of existing data. This covers activities such as segmenting data across multiple sources, for example stripping out all records older than say 7 years which are no longer relevant. Or making sure that dates of birth are present and also make sense. Users often enter today’s year when entering someone’s date of birth for example. Another typical exercise that falls into data cleanse is re-arranging addresses so that the right parts of the address are in the right place. For instance, making sure that the postcode field only contains postcodes and so on.

Data preparation

This step involves taking the clean data and transforming it into the correct structure so it can be loaded into Salesforce. This may involve splitting a person’s name into separate first and last name fields. We will also add information such as the Salesforce record owner, the record created date in the correct format for uploading. We may also need to split data into separate files which are interlinked which match the Salesforce data model.

Data migration

Last but not least, we will prepare dataload scripts that enable us to transfer your data into Salesforce. A key part of this phase is testing, correcting errors and re-testing. Working with data can be challenging and taking a methodical and careful approach which includes lots of testing is vital. It’s a bit like rehearsing a play over and over again in order to make sure the final performance is executed perfectly.

Star Trac engaged Rephrase to carry out an audit of our Salesforce system, identify areas that needed improvement and make recommendations on the best way to proceed. We found Rephrase to be efficient and thorough and the report they provided has given us an external view of our system and helped us see the wood for the trees. We are working through the improvements highlighted in the report and deriving greater benefit from Salesforce as a result. We would recommend the Rephrase audit service to companies in need of a comprehensive Salesforce review.

John Gamble, Managing Director of Europe, Middle East & Africa, Star Trac