Replacement as an opportunity

With around 300 customers in German-speaking countries - including financial institutions, insurance companies, Telecommunications company and companies like BMW Group, DaimlerChrysler or the German Telekom - counted Fuzzy! Computer Science once one of the leading providers of data quality solutions.

1994 as a spin-off from Daimler Chrysler founded and acquired by the former Business Objects in the fall of 2007, the company was immediately acquired together with its new parent by the SAP taken over.

Initially, the Walldorf all rights and obligations under the existing contracts. But then the maintenance contracts were terminated.

The maintenance of the products "Fuzzy Boycott", "Fuzzy Bank" and "Fuzzy Move" has already expired in 2012. For "Fuzzy Post", the end of maintenance is imminent for the end of 2013 and for "Fuzzy Double" at the end of 2014.

For the IT managers concerned, there is now an acute need for action if they want to continue to maintain customer data that is postal and free of duplicates.

While a batch solution can be replaced with comparatively little effort, the situation is different for service components (API). Integrated into solutions and processes, in-depth adaptations of existing systems are necessary here. The project costs exceed the pure software costs.

So what to do? Tolerant Software offers users of the Fuzzy!Tools an alternative to its previous solution: the 2009 by former Employees the fuzzy! Computer Science The company develops "state of the art" data quality andApplications. For example, for duplicate checks, postal checks, name analysis or the comparison of sanctions lists.

Extensive knowledge of the Fuzzy! products offers the option of simple replacement of the previously used Tools. A standardized migration path can reduce the necessary effort by a factor of two to three.

This is also helped by the Know-how of the former Fuzzy!Employees. However, the crucial bottleneck lies elsewhere: The termination of maintenance contracts triggered an increased demand for data quality products.

However, experience shows that many companies delay a new acquisition as long as possible. Tolerant recognized this early on and entered into a partnership with the Dutch data quality specialist Human Inference. Their solutions expand the Tolerant offering, for example with matching methods that use a knowledge base and natural language processing techniques beyond the fuzzy! functionalities, all the way to a complete solution for the Master Data Management.

The solution "HIquality for SAP" about enables SAP-users to quickly enter and change contact data. Pollution is prevented as soon as the data is entered, in accordance with the first-time-right principle, as contact data is validated immediately and by checking whether it has already been entered in the SAP-system are present.

The Software is completely integrated in SAP EEC and CRM integrated and from the SAP certified.

To facilitate the entry of international data, all name data can be entered in a single field. The assignment of the data to the corresponding fields of the SAP-mask, the Software which has correct address information from 240 countries.

Since it is within SAP is not easy to find contact data with a search request, HIquality offers additional functionalities. For example, an error-tolerant search function has been added to the F4 search.

It also delivers correct results when data is entered by ear - for example, in the call center. Typing errors are also no problem and are corrected automatically.

With the migration offer from Tolerant and Human Inference, there is a solution for Fuzzy! users for their respective needs. Ideally, not only is the previous status quo maintained, but there is even an improvement in data quality after the changeover.

The popular principle of IT managers "Never touch a running system!", which was adopted in 2007 after the Fuzzy Computer Science through SAP worked quite well, is no longer an option six years later.

Users who do not act now will face major problems next year and the year after at the latest.

Christoph Klecker is Director Business Development DACH at Human Inference. He has more than 20 years of experience in the data warehouse, data integration and data quality market. As a startup manager, Christoph Klecker was involved in numerous market entries or realignments of IT companies. Among others at Information Builders, Seagate Software, Ardent/Ascential Software and Informatica.