IBM boosts Countrywide's data crop

IBM Business Analytics provides better insight into farmers’ buying habits

Countrywide Farmers, leading supplier of products to the rural community, has installed IBM Business Analytics to merge data held in multiple databases and different formats into a single data warehouse.

Installed with the help of specialist BI systems integrator Tahola, the software gathers information from two SQL databases relating to Countrywide’s retail and agriculture businesses, containing about 250,000 and 40,000 customer records respectively.

It will also be used to pull data from the company’s energy business database once the information has been verified and consolidated.

Countrywide ICT service delivery manager Paul McKeown said the company adopted the technology to get better insight into customers’ buying patterns.

“We had been struggling to look at any one customer and see their entire spend analysis – what products they were buying, what kind of promotion they tended to go for – and this solution helps us aggregate our data to allow us to offer them the right product at the right time and make decisions about future offers,” he said.

“It took about three months for the retail and agriculture databases to be integrated but they were in fairly good condition,” said McKeown. “The energy database will probably take another four to five months to complete because the data inside it is quite poor – the challenge is not around the integration, but making sure that the data is clean.”

The matching process itself can be painstaking, because the software used to support the product sales system uses a different format.

“Getting data from the relevant systems in a way that can be merged is the hardest part by far – the systems have different data formats, and some did not have clean links which let us see the same customers in a different system, and overcoming this was difficult,” said McKeown. “Obviously, with customer accounts you have to be very certain, so we used postcode and data matching to find the customers, then basically ran through them manually to make sure that the accounts are the same.”

The software is currently used only by Countrywide’s buying, sales and marketing teams, but may be extended to regional managers at a later stage.

“It is still early days as far as using the system is concerned, but the benefits so far include being able to categorise customers better, and to see what they are spending, where and how,” said McKeown.