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Data Warehousing and Data Mining

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Case Study fedex

cost savings all Day Long
How does FedEx make the case for IT spending? Cost savings is a large component. In
particular, an innovative Web-based customer service portal, called FedEx InSight, has
aligned with significant increases in the use of FedEx services by some of the company’s
most valuable customers.

With FedEx InSight, business customers view all outgoing, incoming, and third-party
shipments online and they prefer interacting with FedEx Insight over other channels. In
fact, they like it so much that they forgo lower rates from competitors in order to have
access to FedEx online tracking.
Cutting costs while increasing customer loyalty, InSight is considered by FedEx to be a
milestone technology. The innovative Web service lets business customers instantly
access all their current FedEx cargo information, tailor views, and drill down into freight
information including shipping date, weight, contents, expected delivery date, and related
shipments. Customers can even opt for email notifications of in-transit events, such as
attempted deliveries, delays at customs, etc.
the perfect Match
InSight works because FedEx can link shipper and receiver data on shipping bills with
entries in a database of registered InSight customers. The linking software FedEx chose to
support InSight had to be superior in terms of its ability to recognize, interpret, and match
customer name and address information. Fast processing speed and flexibility were also
top criteria. After a broad and thorough evaluation of vendors in the data quality market,
the delivery giant chose Trillium Software®.

The real matching challenge was not with the records for outgoing shippers, who could
be easily identified by their account numbers. Linking shipment recipients to customers
in the InSight database was far more difficult. It relied on name and address information,
which is notoriously fraught with errors, omissions, and other anomalies—especially when
entered by individual shippers around the globe. The point of pain was being able to match
on addresses, because what FedEx receives on the airbills is not very standardized.
FedEx airbills had another problem: too much information. “For the purpose of matching
customers to shipments, the airbills contain a lot of garbage,” said FedEx’s senior technical
analyst. “Information such as parts numbers, stock-keeping units, signature requirements,
shipping contents, delivery instructions, country of manufacture, and more obscures the
name and address data, making it difficult to interpret that free-form text and correctly
identify name and address information.”
a Deeper Look at Data
As Trillium Software® demonstrated to FedEx during the sales cycle, no matching software
would be successful for FedEx airbills without some intelligent interpretation of free-form
text and standardization. Matching is more accurate when it acts on more complete and
standardized data.
The Trillium Software System® first investigates data entries word by word—not just line
by line—in order to understand maximum data content. Valid content is often “hidden”
when it’s entered in the wrong field or free-form text fields. Trillium technology reveals
this hidden data by identifying individual data elements in each shipping bill, interpreting
Contd...

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