What is data harmonization? A quick guide

Get a solid understanding of data harmonization and what it can offer consumer packaged goods businesses.

Data is like water – it’s everywhere and it takes many different shapes. When collected and stored properly, you have a clear and easy to navigate data lake – where you can swim in incredible insight. But things get a little murky when there are formatting issues, duplicates, junk and missing data. Suddenly your crystal clear data lake becomes a stagnant data swamp full of disorganized raw data.

In a data swamp, you can’t easily see all of your raw data or make sense of it. You can’t glean good insights. So how can you clean up the swamp? The answer is simple – data harmonization.

Data harmonization at a glance

Let’s start with the basics. Data harmonization enhances the quality and integrity of your business’s data by creating a single source of truth through data processing.

How data harmonization works

Data harmonization makes your business data “analytics ready” by bringing together disparate and various data sources, verticals, file formats and naming conventions into a single database and then reorganizing it all into a single schema. Your data is gathered, organized and centralized to become visible in a single, comprehensive data view. It is customizable and your view can be automated and analyzed with dashboards.

It’s an ongoing process

Data harmonization needs to be maintained to keep your past, present and future data easy to access, understand and analyze. This includes continuously validating your data points across channels to ensure metric comparisons are accurate. It also means regularly creating new attributes to enhance analysis when new data sets and/or information is added.

Why is data harmonization important?

When well executed, data harmonization gives you a complete view of your business performance. It empowers your business with high quality data and insights that can help you win online and in store. This is incredibly valuable for manufacturers like consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies that tend to be omnichannel.

Not harmonizing data is risky business

It’s a huge challenge for omnichannel CPGs, operating brick-and-mortar businesses and online stores, to get a complete and clear view of their business performance. They need to scavenge their data from multiple sources across a physical and virtual landscape. When you gather, store and analyze parts of your data separately, you miss major connections.

Without data harmonization, business data is siloed, disorganized and inconsistently formatted. This can lead organizations to make bad decisions, lose sales and experience instability.

What data harmonization software does

Data harmonization software gives you that much needed holistic view of your business’s performance. It fosters easy data analysis and comparison across different data sets by converting them into a common standard. When used properly, the software:

• Acquires data from multiple sources. Sources may include market (syndicated), consumer (research and loyalty), trade and revenue trends, account (shipments, POS sales, store level information), trade/RGM (baseline, promotion), product (master data, pricing), external (such as weather) and other (e.g. currency rates).
• Ingests data. The data is gathered and stored in a combined, cleansed, centralized source.
• Harmonizes and customizes data. The harmonization process includes extraction (reading the data in the original data set), conversion (changing its format) and writing (incorporating the data into a new central database). The information is then blended together using machine learning and a “rules engine”. For example, an item that has a different description in three different data sources will be adjusted to have a consistent description and performance, and will be viewable in one place.
• Enriches data. Custom market metrics like productivity are used to index an item’s velocity performance to the segment or category.
• Analyzes data. Analysis unlocks actionable insights by channel, brand and customized subsegments.

How data harmonization enhances your business

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