Statista states that approximately 181 zettabytes of data will be captured, created, copied, or consumed in 2025. Unsurprisingly, businesses account for the majority of global data capture. However, while enterprises gather significant amounts of digital information, about 80% goes unused.
Data underutilization is a complex problem. Solving it requires a multifaceted approach that includes deduplication, enhancing data management strategies, and, perhaps most importantly, data unification.
The combined power of an enterprise-grade data matching solution and a real-time data replication tool can advance your organization’s analytics initiatives by delivering the data unification needed to make more timely, informed decisions.
An intelligent data matching tool with real-time dedupe capabilities can help your organization gain a rich singular, 360-degree view of each entity and eliminate the duplicate records that obscure a clear view of your data.
Paired with a replication solution, your business can distribute, centralize, and synchronize fresh, deduplicated data from disparate locations across the enterprise.
Let’s take a closer look at what data unification is and how it can support the efficacy of your analytics solutions.
What Is Data Unification?
Data unification is the process of aggregating data from disparate operational systems and merging them into a single source of truth by deduplicating, cleaning, and integrating all records.
The first step to data unification is data “ingestion,” or importing operational data from your enterprise’s various systems and applications. Once the data has been ingested, you can begin the cleaning process. You’ll also need to perform necessary transformations, schema integrations, deduplication, or consolidate like records.
After thoroughly cleaning the data, you can export them back into the different systems you use to power your operations.
The Keys to Unification: Data Matching and Data Replication
Third-party applications like data matching solutions and data replication tools are invaluable during data unification initiatives, as these technologies facilitate cleaning processes while minimizing downtime.
When you use a data replication tool, you can create a copy of your current systems. You can then leverage the data matching tool to identify and eliminate duplicate records.
During the cleaning process, you’ll also have a chance to optimize data, remedy errors, remediate custom code, and selectively return data to your system with nearly no downtime.
Why Is Data Unification Necessary?
During a survey of 1,500 global enterprise leaders, researchers found that five key barriers prevent enterprises from putting their data to work. These include:
- Making collected data usable
- Managing data storage
- Ensuring that relevant data is collected
- Ensuring that collected data is secure
- Making different silos of data accessible
Data unification addresses three of these barriers by making data usable, assisting with data storage, and tearing down silos between disparate systems.
By removing these usability hurdles, data unification initiatives empower your organization to leverage digital information to guide decision making processes.
Data Unification Business Scenarios
The applications for data unification are virtually limitless. However, three of the most common business scenario use cases include:
Customer Loyalty
Customers typically interact with brands through multiple channels. Brands gather data for each customer along these touchpoints, but the data isn’t always housed and structured together.
The large volume of data dispersed across many sources makes understanding and predicting customer needs difficult. As a result, brands may lack an actionable view of each customer.
With a data matching and replication workflow, the brand can channel all incoming customer data to one centralized data lake, regardless of source. The organization can merge matching records into a single customer view to drive more robust market segment building and customer lifetime value analysis.
Maximizing LTV through proactive loyalty-building initiatives can lead to more stable cash flow and increased total revenue.
Manufacturing and CPG
As manufacturers look for cost optimizations and new efficiencies amid the current economic downturn, a unified supply chain can be the key to more innovative planning and execution.
With the combined power of data replication and matching, manufacturers can capture changes across the entire supply chain and ensure they’re synchronized and updated across all systems. They can then confirm that there aren’t any duplicate part entries or vendors that could be creating unnecessary expenditures.
With their clean, unified data, these manufacturers can analyze data synchronized from various sources to improve order forecast and supply planning. Additionally, they can increase overall operational agility, readily adapt to volatile market conditions, and promote business continuity.
Digital Patient Records
With the healthcare industry embracing digitization, there’s a growing need to consolidate the data stored across various medical systems and applications.
Unifying healthcare records is critical to enabling healthcare providers to make data-driven decisions based on actionable insights. Ultimately, these insights can lead to improved patient outcomes and expedited delivery of care, two ongoing goals central to the healthcare industry and related fields.
Healthcare organizations can use a data replication tool to ingest, centralize, and synchronize patient data from multiple sources, including medical claims, hospital EHRs, patient registries, and wearable devices. Once integrated, this information becomes readily accessible for reference or use.
With the power of data matching, these organizations can easily clean and standardize inconsistent EHR fields and reconcile unresolved patient identities that may be inconsistent across systems.
Unify Your Data with Syniti
With the right tools at your disposal, data unification can be a frictionless endeavor that supports your analytics solutions and helps you achieve core business objectives. Syniti provides a complementary suite of solutions designed to minimize downtime while optimizing data quality.
Our bundled solution will:
- Create a copy of your current systems
- Remove and optimize data
- Update your applications
- Remediate custom code
- Selectively return data to your enterprise with almost no downtime
Syniti’s data replication tool and data matching solution can support improved decision-making in your existing platform or prepare you for a transition to SAP S/4HANA. In addition to providing you with leading technology, Syniti’s team can offer our expertise to facilitate a seamless migration.
When you’re ready to accelerate your data unification journey, connect with one of our data experts to start a conversation.