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Trillium Software uses a 'digital squeegee'

by Robert Felton

Paul Kochanski, Trillium Software's strategic alliance manager for North America

IT managers everywhere rolled their eyes knowingly when attention turned to Florida during the 2000 election and officials learned that much of the data coming out of that state's polls was questionable. Companies large and small cope daily with the same problem, and the implications can be huge.

Teradata partner Trillium Software provides the digital squeegee that cleanses data—and helps keep it clean. Now scrubbing data in more than 1,000 public and private-sector installations worldwide, the Trillium Software System is available directly from Trillium as an add-on package. The company also offers connectors for SAP and Siebel databases to increase the value of the Teradata environment.

Founded in 1994, Trillium Software develops standalone and integrated applications that do everything from inspecting data sets for suspicious patterns to interrogating and scrubbing data in real time as it arrives from multiple sources—such as remote locations, online customers or recently purchased mailing lists.

For example, a major technology company retained Trillium Software to straighten out chronic data problems—some of which caused rejection of entire shipments at dockside because of incorrect invoices.

Trillium Software found the cause of those problems: 40% of the addresses in the company's U.S. customer database contained errors. Once corrected, the company realized an immediate savings of $200,000 in mailing costs alone. Additionally, the company reduced product inventories to three months from four months, realizing more than $430 million in cash flow. Best of all, a team from Trillium Software and the company achieved these results without taking the data offline.

When a government agency in Europe found that multiple IT systems spread across multiple departments in its revenue division were hampering its ability to maintain and understand tax records, it turned to Trillium Software.

Today, the department maintains its records at a central location. It has a single view of data throughout the organization, and it saves money because development projects for different platforms are no longer necessary.

Data scrubbing begins by defining the shape of the data: "Is it 'St.' or 'Street'?" asks Paul Kochanski, Trillium Software's strategic alliance manager for North America. "The Trillium Software System provides rules right out of the box to get you started."

Better yet, the Trillium Software System provides a front end for modifying rules as needed. The software comes out of the box with rule sets in multiple languages, too, and those rules take into account local nuances. Addresses in Belgium, for example, require different formats and information than addresses in the United States. No problem.

Once the extant data sets are tidied up, plug-in tools callable from running applications help keep data clean so that errors don't sneak back into the database.

Robert Felton, a former editor with InTech Magazine, has written for Civil Engineering and more than a dozen other specialty publications.

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