CASE STUDY:

International Dairy Deli Bakery Association

The International Dairy Deli Bakery Association (IDDBA) is dedicated to moving the Dairy-Deli-Bakery industry forward through education, training, and networking opportunities. Their members are retailers, manufacturers, wholesalers, brokers, and distributors. Their annual conference is the largest in the world in its category, with more than 10,000 attendees and more than 800 exhibiting companies.

The Problem

Founded in 1964, IDDBA found itself with a great deal of data of varying quality and consistency, distributed across multiple systems and databases, including a ProTech AMS. Staff at multiple levels and in multiple departments had regular and ongoing data analytics needs, but reporting and querying was both time-consuming and incomplete, as there was no single source of data for staff to use in running reports. Staff was also constrained in the types of reports and queries available to them, and a lack of agreement of what specific association terms meant. The needs of the Membership department were especially acute.

The Solution

IDDBA leadership decided to bring together all relevant data into a single repository, with two tiers of benefit: first, the data blending process would support quality control and deep data cleansing, and second, the data repository could then become a rich resource of information for staff to review and analyze for insight.

IDDBA performed a search and evaluation of data analytics tools and selected Nucleus.

pathway to success

The Nucleus team worked with IDDBA to identify the sources of data that would be integrated and blended together in Nucleus. The team also documented current data challenges preventing the IDDBA from being successful, and other areas of concern limiting the team’s willingness to rely on the data. The IDDBA supported this effort by prioritizing the critical challenges, which allowed the Nucleus team to align the workplan to the priorities.

The aim was to apply data governance techniques to help analyze the data assets and then create comprehensive datasets across all the data sources to support the varied reporting requirements across many departments.

 
 

Data inconsistencies fell into two categories:

 

  • Varying data from different systems: this indicated inconsistency with what data was collected in the source systems or in data collection options that differed between systems.
  • Varying data within a system: this indicated inconsistency in data entry and maintenance, or a lack of standards for imported data during the life of a system.

Gravitate worked to resolve both challenges by collaborating with the IDDBA to establish data policies and standard operating procedures to standardize data collection, integrations, and processing.

Gravitate also deployed the Nucleus Data Glossary to store all the terms and definitions defined during the data governance efforts so that all the staff would have a clear understanding of what constitutes a member and other key association terms.

Based on blended data, Gravitate setup its baseline membership and event packages to support reporting requirements, and configured data cards and filters to meet IDDBA’s specific data analysis needs.

Life with Nucleus

Brien Lilja, IT Analyst at IDDBA, describes the current state of data and analytics at his organization:

Looking at the big picture here at IDDBA, the data cleanup initiative has been a major success, especially for the Membership team, who had the greatest need.

“It’s fantastic to be able to tell staff just look in Nucleus and that’s your answer, that’s all you need – don’t bother with ProTech, don’t run queries and other reports – Nucleus is where to ask questions and get your answers.”

Another benefit is that staff are using Nucleus for Board reports, which not only saves a ton of time, they love being able to immediately answer questions about how the data was generated.

It helped that Nucleus is instantly understandable.  “We didn’t have to do much for adoption among staff. Now, if anyone doesn’t see what they need in Nucleus, they come to me and I am able to make it available for them quickly and easily.”

I can typically provide whatever they need myself, but when I do need support, Gravitate has a consistent approach – they say “Tell us what you need and we’ll take care of it” – and they do.

Also, we recently acquired Informz for email marketing and Nucleus will be helping with insights and segmentation. Going forward, we expect to add the Exhibits carousel too.”

“Of all the tech partners we’ve had, this is far and away the most positive integration and easiest relationship.”