This week, we're going to be talking again about that little devil that keeps cropping up - data.
I'm speaking to Costas Xyloyiannis, CEO of HICX, a company that takes a slightly different approach to data. Today we’re talking about what he thinks is the safest way to get clean data in your organisation.
Before we dive into the specifics of what makes his approach to data so different, I start off by asking Costas to explain Hicx in a nutshell.
I ask how this differs from other solutions that take the approach of automatically gathering data using scraping techniques or AI.
Costas gives a few differences here. Number one, what is the customer trying to solve? A lot of his customers want the right data in their systems. What you tend to find is that when you pull data out, clean it, change it, what you find is that you can never put it back into those systems. The data will have changed. So this is a very high risk, unsustainable approach. But this is the way most people have done it traditionally.
HICX puts processes in place which control how data is entered into those systems. The supplier is the source of truth, so why not optimise the process of collecting data from suppliers? Only then does HICX apply automation to enrich that data.
He says this is correct. He then goes on to speak to customer demand. Customers need a very granular view of their suppliers. If you’re looking at, for example, a process around manufacturing that has to take place at your supplier’s facility, most other sources don’t explain the things customers want to know: What is the parent legal entity, for example? These factors change how data and business processes are managed.
I bring up vendor master data. We often think about this wrongly: “What data do we need in the system to pay the supplier?”. But in something like manufacturing, food or automotive where you’ve got health and safety requirements that are important to the qualification process, there has to be some way of distinguishing the supplier experience and on-boarding process. If you’re using a tool that automatically cleanses data, it’s not going to know how strategically critical a supplier will be to you.Costas agrees. He also says that context of how you use data is important. It could be the address of a supplier, it could be a payment address… When you’re cleansing you don’t know these things. Costas thinks that this is where customers need help: Who is the parent entity? Is this supplier part of the same legal entity? What is this address? How does it all fit together? This is what customers need to understand to a high degree of accuracy.
He goes on to talk about the importance of being clear on your use case. If your use case is highly analytical, then using
