Data management key for trucking company

Pitt Ohio refines address information for more efficient shipping times, advanced logistics

Transportation company Pitt Ohio makes more than 9,500 daily deliveries to more than 14,000 unique locations. On any given day, the company processes up to 11,000 new invoices – each entered manually in a process that historically favored entry speed over data quality.

While understandable from an operational perspective, this rapid-fire approach to data entry eventually created a significant duplicate data problem for the company. Each variation in customer name or address would create a new customer record, meaning that a single entity could be represented dozens of times in the database.

From 650,000 records to 10,000

Pitt Ohio selected SAS^® Data Management to address its customer data integration initiative. The software’s intuitive interface allowed business users – whose job performance was tied to data quality – to take responsibility for managing customer data.

SAS enabled Pitt Ohio to discover and address problematic data, and to verify and merge customer records. Business users were able to build data improvement workflows quickly and logically with the tool’s innovative job flow builder.

This allowed the company to reconcile customer records, identify duplicates and reduce these multiple instances into a single master record. Pitt Ohio reduced 650,000 unique database entries into an accurate master repository of just 10,000 records.  

Turning data management into a competitive advantage

Pitt Ohio began the project with a nine-month implementation goal. With SAS' flexibility and ease of use, deployment and learning time were much shorter than expected. The project was completed in just five months.

In addition, Pitt Ohio began the deployment with an expectation of an ongoing 95 percent data consolidation rate. SAS allowed the company to surpass this goal, giving them a consistent 99 percent consolidation rate.

Before implementing SAS Data Management, Pitt Ohio's customer data management processes consumed significant amounts of time from IT and business users. After implementing SAS, Pitt Ohio was able to manage this information with only a single business user.

For Pitt Ohio, sophisticated data management practices have resulted in more than just a cleaner database. With SAS, the company has been able to provide more targeted service, identify its most valuable customers and deliver competitive value.

These improvements enabled the transporter to gain a competitive advantage. By refining its address information, the company was able to offer customers better shipping times and more advanced logistics than its competitors.