When implementing any of the modules of Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) from Real-time CDP, Customer Journey Analytics, Adobe Journey Optimizer, or Offer Decisioning, the first – and often most time consuming – aspect to the implementation is ingesting data into the Experience Platform in order for it to be used.
Adobe offers a series of prebuilt connectors to allow you to access data from multiple system, that enables you to get data quickly, and easily, from external systems into the Adobe Experience Platform. These connectors ultimately help accelerate loading the data into the platform but there are still these remaining critical data issues:
- Data Hygiene
- Data Definitions
- Data Ownership
Resolving these data issues take a lot of time and communication across multiple teams within an organization and also between the organization and the implementation partner. This can often cause long delays in the project, extending time to value of any implementation. In order to overcome these barriers, we created the AEP data ingestion accelerator to focus on ingesting multiple disparate datasets and creating a singular feed into the Experience Platform which greatly accelerates the implementation process, time to value, reduces costs, and provides transparency to the organization on data ingestion.
The AEP data ingestion accelerator is a cloud-based, data management solution that allows you to collate marketing data from many different sources, store it in its natural and native form in the cloud, and deliver it in different formats. Flexibility and adaptability are among the Experience Platform’s main attributes. However, Merkle’s rich data heritage has enabled us to identify two different types of organizations that can benefit from the accelerator based on their level of data maturity:
Larger Enterprise Organizations with mature and capable teams
For a large car manufacturer, Merkle took just nine weeks to develop a centralized audience data hub for multiple, disparate, legacy marketing, and CRM data repositories to enable a unified analytics-driven audience hub. This mitigated a multi-million-dollar re-platforming investment while empowering the organization and enabling the quick adoption of AEP.
Organizations with legacy data platforms
In just ten weeks, we assisted a large global, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) organization by using the accelerator that provided a unified set of data that could be send to Adobe Experience Platform. This consolidation and hygiene enabled the organization to activate and orchestrate targeted insight-driven audiences across multiple digital channels, avoiding a significant technology transition cost.
The Adobe Experience Platform data ingestion accelerator runs through a four-stage process:
Ingestion
Importing data for immediate storage by prioritizing, validating, and staging the data in its native format. The ingestion process is event driven and is supported by a serverless architect with automatic schema detection which means that you do not have to spend time creating custom formats or mapping documents before ingesting data.
Cleansing and Hygiene
Merkle understands the needs and requirements around making data right for a marketing purpose. This is quite unique from use cases for a master data management (MDM) scenario. As part of the accelerator, we have baked in over twenty years’ worth of experience and cleansing rules to ensure that we are getting the best results for a marketing perspective. At the same time, during this step we also do householding, enabling you to bring this directly into Adobe Experience Platform.
Load
Loading is the automation process of taking the raw data that arrives from the multitude of data sources and transforming the data into a standard set of destination tables that match our industry schemas in our other Adobe Experience Platform accelerators. At this stage, we also provide dashboards and automated monitoring to ensure that the system is running 24-hours a day and processing your data correctly.
Push
Once all the data has been ingested, cleansed, and loaded into a destination schema, we automatically push this into a pre-configured XDM (experience data model) schema within Adobe Experience Platform to ensure that the data is ready for further matching and activation.
This entire process only takes between six to twelve weeks to setup, reducing the average Adobe Experience Platform implementation by 30% or more.
If you would like more information, contact us at marketing@merkleinc.com.
Load
Loading is the automation process of taking the raw data that arrives from the multitude of data sources and transforming the data into a standard set of destination tables that match our industry schemas in our other Adobe Experience Platform accelerators. At this stage, we also provide dashboards and automated monitoring to ensure that the system is running 24-hours a day and processing your data correctly.
Push
Once all the data has been ingested, cleansed, and loaded into a destination schema, we automatically push this into a pre-configured XDM (experience data model) schema within Adobe Experience Platform to ensure that the data is ready for further matching and activation.
This entire process only takes between six to twelve weeks to setup, reducing the average Adobe Experience Platform implementation by 30% or more.
If you would like more information, contact us at marketing@merkleinc.com.