Trade Association Data Quality & Reliability, Optimization, and Infrastructure

The Audiovisual and Integrated Experience Association (AVIXA) is an international trade association and professional society representing the audiovisual industry’s community of manufacturers and professionals that provide the tools and expertise necessary to convey ideas and enhance communication in virtually every human arena.  

Challenge

AVIXA was experiencing challenges with data quality and reliability when running reports from their Fonteva (Salesforce-based) Association Management System. They had migrated from another Microsoft-based AMS previously, but had not been able to address some historical data structure issues when implementing the new system.  This resulted in not only quality issues, but unnecessary overhead when reporting out of Tableau.    

AVIXA’s Business Intelligence and Data Management team engaged with CorrDyn to address some of the most pressing issues, specifically:

• Data quality and reliability,  
• Optimization of data pipeline for improved speed and lower maintenance overhead when reporting on departmental KPIs, and
• Consulting regarding alternative data infrastructure that aligns with AVIXA’s long term goals for measurement, customer segmentation, improved targeting of marketing and service campaigns, and better visibility into and responsiveness from member engagement.

‍Solution

Structurally, CorrDyn revised critical data pipeline components from Tableau Data Prep and static files to a more reliable model entirely based on in-database views.  We consolidated to a single location for the management of data mappings, transformations, and KPI definitions.  In addition, we updated a key Tableau report to reflect validated KPIs on top of the new data pipeline.  

In order to help AVIXA prepare for future infrastructure enhancements, CorrDyn presented data pipeline and data warehousing with best practices to IT leadership for consideration in their long-term data strategy review, with a focus on increased reliability with less management overhead from the IT department.

In addition, CorrDyn trained the AVIXA Business Intelligence and Data Management team on how to manage, update, and incrementally improve on the new data pipeline as time allows.

Result

The performance of the data pipeline was greatly enhanced, with data pipeline runs reduced from a 6 hour full refresh and 60 minute incremental refresh down to a 20 min full refresh.  The data quality and duplication issues that were addressed reduced the data processed from 17 million records to 2 million records, greatly improving the overall efficiency and performance of the warehouse as well as subsequent reporting.  

The consulting provided by CorrDyn has provided the Data Management and IT leadership teams with the necessary components to present the executive team with an updated plan for overall data process improvement to be implemented as time and budget allows.  

Testimonial

As with many similar organizations to ours, data transformation and loading is not currently a core competency within our available resource set. Instead it is covered in piecemeal across several roles and departments. Thus we sought CorrDyn’s help in filling the gap with knowledgeable data professionals who could help us break through the more challenging aspects of the data so that the ETL process was more efficient and effective. I have been more than impressed by the level of knowledge and professionalism at CorrDyn from the first scoping conversation to the last project debrief. They have a keen understanding of enterprise data issues, including those of associations. I will not hesitate to reach out for other future work of a similar kind and as we attempt to tackle some of the larger data process and architecture needs we face. I highly recommend them to others for the same.  

— Sean Wargo,  Sr. Director, Market Intelligence, AVIXA

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