I have mentioned the critical importance of data quality in a few of my recent posts.  This post is going to take a deeper dive into data quality.  Why is data quality so important?  According to Tom Redman (“the Data Doc), “Better data means fewer mistakes, lower costs, better decisions, and better products”.  In fact, the cost of bad data is estimated to be 15% to 25% of revenue for most companies.  https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/seizing-opportunity-in-data-quality/  So, providing the highest quality data possible to customers can be of the utmost importance to a data company, and to the bottom line of its customers.

KFR Services (RateAcuity’s parent company) has been focused on the quality of the data it provides to its customers for almost 20 years.  In 2001, we set out to differentiate our telecom data products from others by the quality of the data we provided to our customers.  We wanted to track our data quality in a measurable, meaningful way.  We worked with Tom Redman to design a data quality program that would demonstrate to our customers and potential customers the accuracy of our products.  And we are still using that program today.  Using this program, we can track errors reported by customers, determine the root causes of those errors, and eliminate them.  We have not had an error reported by a customer in almost two years, and our overall quality since we started our data quality quest is 99.82%.

While the RateAcuity electric rate database has not been around as long as KFR’s telecom database products, it has matured to the point where we are ready to implement the same data quality programs and standards that we have for our telecom products.  Until now, the RateAcuity team has been reacting to customer reported data issues as they arise.  We are now ready to delve into these issues more fully and perform root cause analysis on these issues and resolutions.  Beginning a data quality program of this sort may not be quick, and may not be pretty, but we are committed to the process and sharing the results with our customers!