Have you ever heard of data consolidation? It is a process that many businesses use when they have a lot of data stored in different places. By consolidating their data, they better understand it, analyze it more easily, and use it to make crucial decisions. For this to happen, they must combine all their data in one place, making it easier to read and use.
What is Data Consolidation?
Data consolidation is a critical process that gathers, merges and saves data from multiple sources in one place. The terms data consolidation and data integration are often used alternately. It is important to note that data integration and data consolidation refer to the same concept.
Modern businesses collect data from different sources, like CRM software, product databases, IoT devices, etc. Although the data collected by these tools is valuable in its limited silo, when combined with the rest of the data that companies collect, it can provide more value.
The process of consolidating data involves 3 things:
- Combining data from different sources
- Cleaning and verifying it by removing errors
- Storing it in a single location, typically a data warehouse or database
Why is Data Consolidation Important?
Consolidating data sources allows companies to plan in an efficient way, execute, and implement business processes and even disaster recovery solutions. This is happening because having all important data in one place makes sure that users have a 360-degree view of all their business assets.
It leads to an improvement in data quality, fast-tracks process execution, and simplifies information access. Consolidated data also makes it easy to identify trends, patterns, and insights that can help optimize business processes and support data-driven decision-making.
In a nutshell, data consolidation is an essential process for several reasons. Let's explore the top 4:
- Firstly, it helps to ensure the quality of the data sources that your company uses to make informed decisions.
- It provides a clear overview of your operation, enabling you to create better business plans.
- It reduces costs by avoiding redundancies and inaccuracies in data reporting, creating a single source of truth, and uncovering misspending or overspending. Besides that, consolidated data in one location saves time. It can be easily accessed and shared across departments, improving business insights.
- Finally, data consolidation is crucial as it ensures that companies have a complete and accurate data set from every data source, allowing for more accurate data analysis.
When does a business need data consolidation?
There are a few topics you need to consider checking if your business will benefit from data consolidation. Here are the three main ones:
- If your company uses multiple source systems to store data, data consolidation can help you identify duplicate data. By making sure there's no duplicate content, you can reduce your data management and save time and money on data maintenance and storage.
- If your data records need to be completed or accurately assigned, data consolidation can help you enrich your data with additional information from external systems. This can provide significant benefits, like saving time and effort manually enhancing address data.
- Data consolidation allows you to use combined information for making informed business decisions. With all relevant information about customers and products available in one place, you can make better decisions and provide better customer service.
Data consolidation can bring several advantages to businesses by providing a complete and accurate view of their data. By identifying duplicates, enriching data, and using combined information for decision-making, companies can save time, effort, and resources and provide better experiences to their customers.
CrateDB simplifies the data infrastructure by providing a real-time unified data repository that natively supports multiple data types. With CrateDB, data consolidation becomes effortless as it offers a single source of truth that is kept updated in near real-time.
Additionally, CrateDB reduces TCO by delivering high performance, scalability, and flexibility. It also simplifies management and maintenance, provides data synchronization, and empowers data applications with support for AI/ML, enabling businesses to overcome the challenges of growing complexity.