Do you ever get songs stuck in your head? I do. Today’s song is “Surf City” by Jan & Dean. “Two girls for every boy” and “I’m going to Surf City where it’s two to one. Yeah, I’m going to Surf City. Gonna have some fun.” It’s kind of annoying, yet it got me to thinking about ratios. Surf City apparently had a 2:1 ratio of girls to boys. I started wondering what kind of ratios I might find in the quarterly report I received regarding our data mapping.
Answers Systems tracks quite a bit of data. Consider the fact that we receive data from hundreds of distributors on tens of thousands of manufacturers (both food and non-food) and hundreds of thousands of unique manufacturer SKUs. For every single unique manufacturer SKU we track there is an average of 37 cross-references that must be made against the multitude of distributors’ SKUs for the exact same product. Each distributor we track could conceivably have a different SKU number linking back to manufacturer SKU 12345. If the average is 37 cross references, can you imagine what the high end of the spectrum must be?
Even with the advent of electronic data, human intervention is required to set up the initial cross references along with constant monitoring to ensure accuracy of mapping long term. And, we haven’t even talked about mapping those SKUs back to the correct contracts so that accurate payments are processed. Nor have we touched on mapping the contracts back to the right sales person, the right sales person to the right division – important stuff if you want certain types of reporting. It can get pretty complex.
“One SKU to 37 cross references” isn’t quite as melodic and catchy as “Two girls for every boy,” but we get pretty excited about this kind of thing around here. Every single line of data mapped means more accurate trade-spend settlement for our clients: that translates into increased SAVINGS and improved ROI, as well as receipt of near real-time, robust, actionable reporting.