3M Case Study

3M executives wanted a better understanding of their business with major global trading partners. After years of investment in a global data warehouse and external reference data providers such as Dun and Bradstreet, 3M still did not have a comprehensive, up-to-date view of their global customers.

The 3M Customer Single Identify (CSI) project leveraged the MDX MDM In-the-Cloud Service to cleanse, match and group customer information from customer facing systems across the world. Prior to the implementation of MDX, 3M account managers relied upon manual efforts to combine reports from the data warehouse in an attempt to understand the 3M footprint with industrial giants such as Ford Motors, BP and General Electric.

MDX at 3M

The CSI project quickly delivered results that surpassed all expectations; 3M was able to identify millions of dollars of revenue that had previously gone unmanaged at key accounts. The improved customer intelligence and reduced administrative costs combined to make CSI a major success at 3M.


Approach

3M provided customer extracts from the existing enterprise data warehouse. The data warehouse was already populated with data from more than 80 global systems and no changes were required to the data warehouse to provide the MDX input files.

MDX provided cleansing and matching services on the 3M data to improve data quality and identify duplicate customers within the data warehouse. This cleansed data was then matched with D&B reference data to understand how these customers rolled up into corporate hierarchies. However, this picture was still incomplete with almost half of the customer records unmatched to D&B.

The MDX Hub provided the grouping logic to place orphan customer records within the existing hierarchies to complete the single customer view. The MDX grouping engine replaced hundreds of hours of manual effort each month and improved accuracy by as much as 40% within a single corporate hierarchy.



Results

The MDX Customer Hub was deployed within 120 days. In this initial deployment:

  • MDX correctly identified between 5% and 40% more revenue per client than 3M had been able to track within it’s enterprise data warehouse.
  • 3M Reduced cycle time (to update customer hierarchies) from 6 months to 1 month.
  • MDX reduced 3M costs of maintaining the customer master files by 30%.