Data Management 101

hello this is Jason Bittner from triple helix Corporation and Welcome to our Helix Insider podcast I'm joined today by two of my team members Andy Webster our senior developer here at triple helix and one of my other developers Pedro Lopez is going to be joining us today so today we're going to be talking to you about data management 101 why what it is and why is it important companies that have a product or service they have customers and they and they sell something to them are going to naturally generate data in the course of doing business and here at triple helix we understand that the importance of data management and information management is so very very important because if you don't have good systems to store this data and work with it it prevents you from being as efficient as possible and ultimately can create barriers to growth because you're spending more time working in your data in your systems as opposed to working on your company um we know this thing to be very very

important because data management really is the lifeblood of a company if you're not working efficiently with these systems then you're basically fighting against yourself um Pedro I'd like to uh turn to you first and love to hear your thoughts on you know what would you recommend for for Automation and some of the pitfalls you've seen for companies that have not fully automated their data well uh I think it's uh you know do an analysis and see if there is any way to connect those systems that might be in place um I know that I work in a long time ago I worked in the accounting department of a big oil and gas company and they used to use a lot of Excel spreadsheets and you know that creates a lot of uh points for failure you know uh wrong data entry and uh the Excel spreadsheet being fast on into various hands um and when you are able to create a system or integrate you know different um systems into one and maybe do some automation where necessary that cuts down you know a lot of time

and uh it frees a parallel a lot of resources as well um making the business flow a little better so um it's definitely something that is very valuable for company you know nowadays and uh you can definitely have an effect as well so Andy what what's your experiences in that same area I've I I worked for a company that had large spreadsheets to manage testing data and in general a spreadsheet is not really useful for collaboration I would say just because you I mean in the large scale a spreadsheet isn't useful for collaboration because you can have problems like the spreadsheet crashing for shared spreadsheets for example if too many people are trying to log in at once I have a in particular an example of that where they had a really large spreadsheet that just crash if too many people were logged into it you know you'd have people hollering around the office like hey who's logged into that or hey does that crash for anybody else you know yelling across the office and you lose all your

data right yeah yeah and then you lose whatever you put in and you know potentially the file could get corrupted there's all kinds of things that could go wrong yeah I have a very similar um example like I worked in a large department and there was like a collaborative spreadsheet about four or five people were in it obviously you can't work in it if somebody else is in it so you know it would lock the spreadsheet when somebody was working on it and then the challenge we ran into is that it's whoever was in the spreadsheet locked it no one can work on it but sometimes somebody would go in lock it and then they go on vacation for two weeks and then we're like now no one can work on it until they're back and you know you can force the free the luck but then they lose all the data that they were working on which can be quite cumbersome and catastrophic so it's it's not a good scene I'd like to talk a little bit about you know what we understand to be you know data automation relating to systems

so many times different types of data reside in different systems and quite honestly for very good reasons a CRM a customer relationship management software is where you put your sales data and your interactions that could be one system another system could be the operation you know what's going on in in maybe a factory or a plant and then you might have your financial system somewhere else like a QuickBooks or Peachtree Accounting but necessarily these systems all at some point do have to talk to each other you know when we talk about our manufacturing customers these companies have invested in software products called Erp systems enterprise resource planning it's very powerful piece of software that those types of companies use to run the organization and quite commonly all of the data is in one place so that's a very good thing but very frequently in organizations that don't have an Erp or maybe they don't have the all of the pieces of an Erp or even those companies that aren't going

to beholden to that type of a software data resides in different systems and so if they're moving data between one another they have to export it re-import it in some cases hand keying it back in creates a huge amount of effort and honestly the ability to connect those systems does exist and you know our recommendation is that if you're going to have different systems because sometimes you you have to find ways to connect the two through what they call apis that stands for an application programmer interface or or some other way because lots of these systems are are so commonly able to link now but the key is to actually see where those gaps are happening and try to make those links happen Pedro do you have an example of that where you saw some workflow Automation and some systems that can be pulled together that in your experience yes uh we recently uh finished up a project that um you know this particular client had um a very old system out of date and it's important to note that um

you know once you go that route it's very important to keep up with the technology so you don't let things you know go out of date or basically lose your investment your initial investment for not keeping up with it but um you know this particular project this client had um you know old database that we had to migrate the data into a new database and I believe it was a sequel and there was a component of a SQL server on that as well um that we brought everything in and remodeled the interface with a new look and optimized for you know optimizing UI ux so that it's easier for the users to access the data and work with the data and so you know that that makes for something that's very valuable for you know any given company as I recall in that particular example um we actually made the new application talk directly to one of the other databases prior to that they would be hand keying the job data into this older system and then having to redo everything but this new system I recall you were

able to actually connect to the other database account directly and actually pull that data in automatically so no one had to re-key everything is all right right so it had a component of you know data that we had to migrate into a database in a server but a second component of that was connecting to outside database and pulling in that data and making it work with the new system and so it it was very important to have that all in one place uh for people to be able to see the data in real time and work with the data in real time I remember that was quite a huge lift for them so yeah nice Andy talk to me about that example of that company um up in Springfield it was a Job Shop and and what we did for some automation for them yeah so the Erp that they had um existing had you know it was a good Erp in general but it didn't have all of the capabilities that they needed to predict and forecast when their stuff would be done for their clients so um you know they've got their job that they're

working through and in some steps of manufacturing a product they have to send it out to an outside vendor or Etc and every step of that has like a time that it takes and so um what what our solution does is basically take all their jobs that they have um in a queue and sort them according to when they'll be done and provides forecast dates for them so in a sense it gives a really good um kind of pulse on where they are manufacturing process for everything across their whole um company as a whole so it really gives it um it's it's a it's a very helpful tool for them that really helps them report accurately to their customers and keep on top of their operations so really talk to me a little bit about the priority that they set too like as I recall they were doing their their um by Department departments didn't know what the priority sequence was they had that on paper and very often that was wrong how did this help them actually manage that oh yeah so what we did is actually so as well

as having this whole system um it's and it's a web application so we can actually have it posted up on a touch screen in their actual manufacturing facility so they have a display that everybody can see um you know the administrators back in the office can log into it and see it there too and it's um and they could filter it based on which department they're into so if you wanted only that department can see only the jobs that are applicable to them so very helpful for keeping everybody on track with each other nice yeah many of the times we're meeting these companies you know we find that they have these systems in that particular example they have one Common Core system but um it was hiding information from the rest of the Departments management knew what the overall priority was but in those individual departments they they didn't so they were able to share that priority with them and then basically push that data Downstream into the department level um we find that still very common

right guys and that you know all of the work that we do is about data consolidation you have data sitting in a pile of spreadsheets you have data sitting on paper and whiteboards uh or buried in systems the whole thing about siled data and you know trying to make sense of the data and actually make it talk to each other is a huge undertaking for some of these firms just because they're systems are are not connected and and the obvious having that connection made makes the overall efficiency of the department and the company that much more efficient just because their data is is embedded and connected to each other as opposed to Spring spread out um I wanted to bring up one example too you know very often we do these things called digital conversions so you know we have companies that do have databases and um but they're not factored well so one company that was a distributor for a wire and cable as I recall they had three databases one for customers one for orders and one for inventory

and and the Monumental task of basically copying the data back and forth when an order was placed was astronomical now those databases were actually factored well so if you're in the customer database you actually had everything you needed and it was in one place but just that enormity of converting um the data when you had to like get a new order or it goes into the customer table for a new customer what are they buying oh we got new inventory and this this constant push-pull of the of typing in the data so a digital conversion project for a company like us would be to just consolidate and put everything into one common database and in their example they were using access so they didn't even have it accessible so the nice thing about these web applications that we write can can not only improve the efficiency of the group the data consolidation but when it's in a web app you can then access it one of the funny things about these guys was that they could never work remotely because all

of their data is in an access database in a file system inside the internal facility nobody can access it but with a web app you can get to it from anywhere so that's kind of thing about you know consolidation is that you can actually make accessibility very very easy with reason of course I remember one particular client this database in Access but when we converted we're even able to create uh application um mobile application for them so they could uh when they have technicians out in the field they could you know seamlessly put their notes and sync back to the database in in real time so that the people in the office or however the whatever they're working from they could access the information instantly and do what they need to do so I really like that example that you gave Pedro because I remember in that particular account the technicians in the field all of their measurement data is paper so an egregious amount of paper and the prior system they would hand them laptops with a big

stack of paper with their jobs they would go on site they would fill in all the data and in some cases they had to physically paper mail it back to the the facility depending on how far are out they were and then someone would be taking that paper and hand transcribing it back into another system so with this system we actually gave it so that the text would have all of the paper um instead in paper actually in their tablets but the nice thing was that the tablets because they don't work um in the basements of some of the facilities these technicians have to go into everything works offline they run the tablet they type in their notes and their measurement data and then they hit submit the tablet has the data and then when they come back into internet land then they can actually transmit it they hit submit and then all that stuff is translated back to the office so no more paper mailing no more manual transcriptions of data which a lot of data was getting inaccurate that way but just the

speed of the execution being able to get all that data back to the office and instantaneously and of course billing because as soon as the paper is there the billing can happen and the customers can get uh build in and this company gets paid faster so you know that ripple effect of just something as simple as a technician you know suffering through paper automated into a tablet both offline and online that's a huge deal and I was really really happy with the work you guys have done on that project it's really had a huge impact for those guys every time that you reduce the amount of manual intervention between steps you also reduce the potential for error so your data is in general better and more usable for reporting in the future figuring out a lot of different kind of things like taxes things like that like when tax season comes around and you need to report on all the different stuff that happened throughout the year you can have you can query a system like this to really save you some

time foreign so um getting to kind of near the end of our talk here I just wanted to offer some final thoughts and you know here are your guys's final closing comments you know so just overall you know information and data management you know we find it to be extremely important for companies that are growing fast and need to you know do things quicker and better and easier among who who wouldn't want that and you know in our world the key is the systems that the data resides in and then how how well those systems operate and and lastly how well they communicate because in some cases if you can't consolidate them into one which is what you should do is your first option second option is just to make sure they can talk to each other um so that you're not manually re-keying data and and causing more effort um Andy final thoughts yeah I just think that um in general the the more you hook things together also just the less work your employees have to do to accomplish your goals and that equals

more efficiency in your company so in general you you get more done for the same amount of money the amount of time time is money yeah exactly Pedro final thoughts well I think uh companies um have to take a step back and think about the last time that they uh thought about their data and how that you know the data the data Integrity affects their um business and see if there is opportunity here to improve things to integrate things and um free up resources right because this whole process um you know the consequence of this whole process is you know freeing up resources so they can like Andy said be more efficient and go do something else and so um I think it's important for people who are listening to uh do just that and if they have any questions uh reach out to us because we we've done this many times and um we can definitely uh help out absolutely no thank you for that yep and you know that just as a reminder to to our listeners too that you know this is you know the core tenant of

triple helix is that you know we understand down that the data of a company is really its DNA that the business data and that to be able to be more smart and more intelligent triple helix actually we have that third strand of DNA to make the company more intelligent that's where triple helix comes from and we recognize the strength of a company is how well they manage and operate with their data and if anyone is thinking that that's been a challenge and you know oh my God how would you possibly uh actually solve my challenges um well that's that as they say the devil's in the details uh we would love to chat with you and and understand more about how we could help but for now I hope this conversation was helpful and enlightening and until next time thanks everybody