When quality matters, validation is critical

The biggest single obstacle to the effective and widespread use of the enhanced spend data is its perceived quality. Wrongly classified or missing suppliers can severely dent confidence in the data and any analysis underpinned by it. This is why we expend as much effort as we do undertaking a comprehensive programme of data integrity checks. This process includes a team of expert data analysts who visually validate category allocation, creditor by creditor for at least 97% of the spend by value.

Not all data enhancement methodologies are created equal

We were asked to undertake an analysis of Sedgemoor District Council’s spend, despite the fact that the analysis had already been undertaken by a competitive service provider. To the untrained eye, the competitor appeared to offer a similar data enhancement methodology. However, the Council was concerned that the initial analysis was insufficiently robust for the purposes for which it was intended. We reprocessed their spend data and delivered a more robust, reliable and significantly superior result:

• We identified, classified and validated 50% more core trade suppliers when compared to the competitor’s efforts,
• We identified and classified more than £3m (representing 22% of the total) of spend that the competitor had missed,
• Our methodology identified and processed all duplicates in the input data, our competitor left duplicates in the processed data amounting to almost 5% of the total,
• Our process ensured that 100% of the core trade suppliers were meaningfully classified; our competitor classified almost 12% of the source file as ‘unknown’ and managed to misclassify a further 30%.