Normalisation is the process of giving company names a common name or grouping. This is helpful for analytics and reporting as it enables a “helicopter view” of your data. For example, in procurement it could show you how much your client or consumer is buying or how much you are selling to them. Normalisation is particularly useful for departments such as these, where differentiating between legal or financial entities is less important.

Our tool is like no other; we use a mixture of technology, automation AND humans. You start by uploading your file of supplier or company names to your personalised dashboard on the website. The power of technology collects this file and sends it to the Samification™ data model, where it will be normalised. Your new normalised file will be returned to your dashboard within minutes.

The normalised data you get back will be accurate, but not perfect, though no data set is.  If your data contains a specific supplier combination we haven’t seen before, the model might not catch it the first time.  But that’s where our not-so-secret sauce comes in. The TCG team will be working in the background regularly, constantly cleaning and improving the master data. The next time you come back for a refresh, your data will be even better than the time before, or the time before that.

At present, we do not instantly translate company names, this is something we look to add as a feature in the future.  We do however have a master list of some non-English companies, and the TCG team will work in the background to clean up any supplier names that are added to our master list.  If you check back regularly the master list will be updated, and every time you normalise your suppliers, the data will be cleaner.

There’s no straight answer to this. It depends on how much data you have and your organisation’s needs. We recommend monthly or quarterly data normalisation to ensure your data is as accurate as possible.

We need two columns of data. One column should contain your supplier or company names. The other column should contain a unique ID for you to merge back into your data if needed. Doing it this way protects your sensitive information.

Once your master data has been normalised and returned to you, we will add your original supplier names to our master list. There will be nothing to identify where these names have originated from, and your privacy will be assured.

We advise you to check and maintain your data on a monthly or quarterly basis, depending on your business needs and how many suppliers you have.