Why data hygiene is key to aftermarket success

Many automotive businesses are flying blind when it comes to managing their data, warns an industry expert.

Clean, well-managed data is not just a technical detail. It gives companies a competitive advantage in the marketplace, explained Todd Campau, associate director of aftermarket solutions at S&P Global Mobility. Those who master data hygiene will be best positioned for success.

“There’s not necessarily a ton of really good data hygiene in the industry, and so there’s room for improvement,” Campau observed.

Campau was the featured guest at a recent YANG Professional Series webinar, where he spoke to young professionals about the importance of data hygiene and best practices for managing information in the automotive aftermarket. He compared data hygiene to personal hygiene, saying it requires discipline and regular attention.

“Good data hygiene, though, is essentially going through the critical data for your business, identifying the primary source that you’re going to look towards for the actual answer, and then creating an environment where the data feeds through, through a hierarchy,” Campau explained.

He pointed out that many companies still rely on outdated or risky practices, such as keeping important data in Excel files on individual desktops.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been working with product managers or others where their master data set is an Excel sheet on their desktop. That’s not good data hygiene. Get that somewhere where it is systematized and backed up,” he said.

Campau stressed the importance of creating a feedback loop so that errors found by customers or in the field are corrected at the source and flow through the entire system.

“If you find poor data at the customer level, and you find out that the customer is right, your catalogue manager can change that in the catalogue data,” he explained. “But it really doesn’t affect the system unless it goes all the way back to the wellspring and you correct the source. Then it flows through the whole channel.”

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