If you are thinking in terms of cleansing of all your data in your home washing machine, using the agitator and running the equipment at full speed, you are farthest from the key issue. Data cleansing is a technical term that relates to checking of records for accuracy, relevancy, illegibility, major spelling errors, etc and doing the needful to make them user-friendly at the time of working with them. Data cleansing can be performed within a single set of records as also between multiple sets of data that needs to be merged, i.e. to be worked together.
Manual data cleansing involves a person or better still with at least two people – one reading through the information and the other doing the necessary corrections. Typographic mistakes and spelling errors are checked and corrected, mislabeled data is appropriately labeled and filed, while unfinished or missing entries are subjected to research and rejuvenation. Unrecoverable records are simply dumped out for creating useful storage space. The mission is sometimes also called Data Scrubbing.
Now let us see what data cleansing is with a software solution. With large organizations (it is difficult for a large organization to carry out manual data cleansing simply because of the huge amount of data that might need to be verified and cleaned), data cleansing is often performed with the aid of computer software that can either be tailored to suit an organization’s special requirements or may be procured from the market. These data cleansing software tools have set guidelines like deleting all records that have not been updated within the last five years or so, correcting zip codes for particular towns or cities, changing the price structure of all saleable products from US Dollar to contemporary Euros. Exceptional software can perform amazingly by recovering partly lost data by activating their own search engines.
The job of data cleansing or data verifying is vital for data dependant business houses. If a client’s email address is not formatted correctly in the database, the company’s automated email system would be unable to send out the special coupons or deals particularly meant for the client, thereby causing serious damage to the company’s goodwill, apart from a loss of business. Even for offline business houses, there may be problems in reaching their clientele if accurate phone numbers are not listed in the database. And even when they are listed, they must be done is such a way so that such data can be retrieved quickly. After all, the job of data cleansing is to ensure that the data or information stored is accurate and useful, and it can be retrieved quickly.
However, when two sets of data need to work in tandem, the picture may turn slightly complex. Fancy a business house having two branches, catering more or less similar customers. Data maintenance and data cleansing assumes even more importance in all such cases.
Here the data not only needs to be accurate (that can be confirmed through data cleansing) for each branch but also should match with each other. If a customer dealing with Branch A has updated his/her phone number, the new number should appear in Branch A’s database as well as in Branch B’s database so that any message that has to delivered to the customer can be done by any of the Branches. For the same reason, data cleansing works not only to ensure that the record is accurate but also it is consistent between different records.
In today’s world, a dependable database is considered to be the backbone of any business – big or small; online or offline, exporting or importing merchandise. Accurate data can only keep that backbone strong and healthy. But human error often creeps in when storing such enormous data in an encrypted database that is the private property of the business house. Without regular cleansing or verifying, whatever you may call it, errors and slip-ups are bound to occur, leading to not only loss of business but loss of face, which is even more perilous.
As earlier mentioned, data cleansing can also be done through computer software that are available in the open market. These software or programs sometimes have amazing qualities that can even provide novel means of business administration through data processing. For instance, there are programs that not only check data for accuracy but help companies build databases which ensure the integrity and accuracy of inventory control. With such tools in hand, business houses can work with lower inventory levels and craft ‘Data-Driven’ purchasing. The programs also help business housed edit and clean available inventory data while creating an accurate baseline database.