BACKGROUND: Zebra Technologies Corporation is a leading global provider of printer, barcode and RFID solutions that help its customers identify, track and manage assets, transactions and people. Zebra Technologies has an international distribution network that spans more than 90 countries across Europe, Asia, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific. The company has sold more than 7 million printers worldwide to date, and its customers include 90 percent of the Fortune 500. Zebra’s products are used in a host of industries, including manufacturing, retail, health care, transportation and logistics, military and government, and mobile workforce.
PLATFORMS: RedHat Enterprise Linux Server (Release 5.3) and development is on Windows XP.
PROBLEM SOLVED: Zebra Technologies was faced with the challenge of migrating all of its corporate data stored across multiple legacy enterprise resource planning systems and other disparate sources to Oracle’s ERP applications. For this migration process, Zebra was looking for a solution to “police” data before sending it to the new master record repository and to govern the data input after migration.
PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY: Zebra Technologies completed several acquisitions over the past few years, and as a result, we have many legacy systems that must be integrated into one platform. The company has everything from Agile PLM and Damantra for planning to Hyperion for reporting and Oracle E-Business Suite as the ERP backbone. DataFlux’s Data Quality Integration Platform is the key component to analyze, cleanse and integrate data from all the legacy applications over to Oracle. Basically, nothing is migrating to Zebra’s ERP system without first going through DataFlux.
STRENGTHS: Zebra primarily uses DataFlux in the batch legacy cleanup mode. The company takes numerous large data files that need to be profiled and consolidated and then runs them through DataFlux, resulting in clean, usable customer records. This is the technology’s main strength and one of the reasons Zebra purchased DataFlux.
WEAKNESS: In the advanced programming functions like real-time services/macros or advanced server configurations, the documentation could be better.
SELECTION CRITERIA: We liked the DataFlux product for its strengths in the batch area. Also, we felt the price-to-value ratio was the highest out of all of the products reviewed.
DELIVERABLES: Zebra standardizes more than 100 different customer fields using DataFlux and uses Address Doctor to enrich the data. This year, the next step in the company’s IT transformation is standardizing order-to-cash data. We expect to use DataFlux to help with item attributes, supplier record cleansing and Zebra employee data cleansing.
VENDOR SUPPORT: The support that DataFlux provided has been very good. I think the company met our requirements, listened and showed the product well. Post sales, they didn’t run from us. They supported us through our learning curve and we used their trainers, which was extremely helpful.
DOCUMENTATION: The available basic documentation is easy to understand, and the product is intuitive. For advanced DataFlux topics, it would be helpful to have more documentation.
DataFlux Data Quality Integration Platform
DataFlux Corporation
940 NW Cary Parkway, Suite 201
Cary, NC 27513
(919) 447-3000
Product reviews are customer testimonials. We thank the author of this review for taking the time to share his or her expertise.
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