Mastering Data at R.R. Donnelley

Information Management Magazine, March 2009

John McCormick

R.R. Donnelley was going through a growth spurt. It was 2005 and the company's revenue had jumped from $2.4 billion in 2003 to $8.4 billion, much of it coming from numerous acquisitions the printing giant had made.

But all that growth was creating information management challenges because customer data from the acquired organizations was stored in multiple source systems. And Donnelley, like many companies its size, had to rely on a manually intensive process to get a comprehensive picture of its customers, such as which Donnelley unit they might be doing business with and what additional products they might want to buy.

So the company set out to find a better way to manage its data.

At the end of 2005, Donnelley embarked on an MDM program, an effort to create a single set of identifiers throughout the enterprise for its customer and vendor data. Having a master of each record would enable the company's applications to tap the most accurate, complete and up-to-date information.

Donnelley is one of a growing number of companies seeking the benefits of MDM, which can increase corporate effectiveness, reduce costs and meet compliance requirements. IT research company Gartner expects that when MDM software revenues are tallied for 2008 they'll hit $1.3 billion, a 24 percent increase over the previous year. While implementation cost estimates range from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to $2 million for big companies, organizations can see an almost immediate return.  Some realize a payback in as little as three months, according to veteran MDM consultant William McKnight, a partner with Lucidity Consulting Group, although he cautions those kind of results are only possible if the deployment is done properly.

Indeed, the benefits of MDM aren't always easy to come by. Most efforts experience organizational, political or governance bumps, according to Andrew White, a research vice president at Gartner who focuses on MDM.

Companies need to agree on how data will be mastered, how data discrepancies will be resolved and who'll make those decisions and be in charge of the process. There are also the budget, staffing and integration challenges that come with any project that spans an enterprise.

And, at Donnelley, the company was dealing with specific challenges that would be expected in an organization that recently made a number of acquisitions. These included issues such as data stewardship - identifying who in the business should "own" the customer information - and inconsistent data definitions that resulted from customer data being in multiple systems.

From a management standpoint, "if you asked one group in the business what 'customer' means, and you asked a different group what 'customer' means, you'd get two completely different answers," says Kim Fahey, a senior director of IT at Donnelley. One group may think of a customer as a specific billing location, another might consider the customer as the legal parent entity.

In the third quarter of 2006, Donnelley brought up its Customer Master Data Store, which now contains more than 250,000 records and integrates numerous source systems - mostly those of its major acquisitions - allowing the company to quickly assemble data from acquired companies, identify top customers and spot sales opportunities. It's become a vital sales and marketing tool.

The data is used every day, according to Fahey, who says the company is now ready to master a second data set - its vendor information.

The IT team had to overcome a number of obstacles, but the effort to date has earned the praise of industry experts. "It's an early success story that others can hope to emulate," says consultant McKnight.

Three Steps To MDM

R.R. Donnelley today is an $11-billion-plus commercial printing and services company offering direct mail, financial printing, forms and labels, and other services. Since the Chicago-based company's $3 billion purchase of commercial printer Moore Wallace four years ago, it has picked up a number of printing-related companies in a series of acquisitions, including its $1.3 billion purchase of printing and supply chain management company Banta, a deal that closed in January 2007.

It was this history of acquisitions that made MDM so essential to the company's operations. Its accumulated size made it impractical to put all its information into one system, necessitating the need to work off multiple data stores. And prior to 2005, the company's existing processes for consolidating data were predominantly manual and time-consuming.

For Donnelley, Fahey says, "MDM was not an option, it was something [the company] had to do."
The company built its current MDM platform in basically three stages: a discovery, strategy and architecture stage; a building stage; and a renovation stage.

When it began with the discovery stage, it recognized that whatever MDM solution it chose, the system would need to be flexible enough to accommodate further corporate acquisitions with their corresponding data sets.

The company also understood that the deployment would need to be minimally invasive to the source systems, so that there would be no disruptions to the business. The solution was a registry model where customer information comes in from source systems, is registered in the hub, cross referenced with other records and placed in a master file - leaving the source system untouched for reporting or analysis.

MDM consultant McKnight says a registry model is the quickest way to get MDM up and going. Under this scenario, companies don't build a separate master data store; instead they identify where the master data resides in the existing system and point to it. The downside of the model is that it creates an extra "jump" every time someone needs the master data, which may degrade system performance. "It's a tradeoff," he says.

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