Reveal gems hidden within your data.

Guided by findings from a Data Animated Audit, Wheaton Group periodically discovers that buried deep within a company’s data are opportunities for Found Money — which are supplemental to the numerous incremental financial benefits that an Audit delivers by improving the Data Value Chain.

Found Money typically results in significant — and sometimes massive — new revenue and/or the capturing of wasted money (such as by reducing costs). And, it often is achieved without the need for meaningful financial investment — an additional benefit during tight economic conditions. Could Found Money be waiting to be "discovered" within your data?

When Found Money opportunities do occur, they are invariably viewed by our clients as being welcome and — often very — profitable surprises. We refer to them as “Eureka” moments. To us, they are a satisfying blend of science, art and intuition.

About our Found Money service:

beyond the audit

‍Found Money is a second, higher-level Data Animated service. If during an Audit we determine that there is the potential for a Found Money opportunity, we will explore your interest in pursuing this additional service, which consists of the following steps:

  • You provide us access to your Atomic-Level (i.e., granular) Data. This is the massive volume of data that you collect on your customers – SKU-level transactions, marketing contacts, and more. This data represents the full historical record of all your company’s customers and marketing activities.
  • We will perform an extensive Data Discovery on this Atomic-Level Data, in order to understand:
  • How well your Atomic-Level Data accurately reflects “reality,” and to marketing concepts that can be profitably leveraged.
  • How your company “digests” its Atomic-Level Data in order to make decisions. Examples of this “digestion” are: 1) customer level summaries, such as Recency/Frequency/Monetary (“RFM”) Cells; 2) summaries across customers, such as reports and dashboards; and 3) statistics-based algorithms that predict customer behavior.
  • How, based on this “digestion,” your company formulates decisions; and, subsequently, executes marketing campaigns.
  • How QC processes are employed to validate these steps.

Data Discovery

This is our proprietary comprehensive, analytic and forensic methodology that:

  • Goes beyond the standard “valid” values, key counts, and referential integrity analysis.
  • Investigates the completeness, consistency, and usability of your company’s data.
  • Establishes the rules necessary for transforming your data into an accurate and usable view of your company’s business as it currently exists, and as it has developed over time.

We will execute as many cycles of “Assumptions → Data Analysis → Correction-of-Assumptions” as is necessary, in order to determine the way to interpret your data as a true representation of your business.

We will methodically interrogate your data for accuracy, completeness, and reasonableness, including:

  • Uniqueness of the native system identifiers, within and across source systems; for example, are purchase numbers unique, or do they require the account number for uniqueness?
  • Trends and seasonality patterns.
  • Longitudinal stability of field-value distributions.
  • Sensibility of the relationships and correlations between these field-values.
  • Existence of implicit transactions; i.e., reflected only in status-changes of other transactions.
  • Consistency between summary data and its corresponding Atomic-Level Data.
  • Core relationships, such as purchase-volume decay subsequent to marketing campaigns.

Insights

‍During Data Discovery, we seek Insights into anything that can be leveraged into opportunities. We will search for mismatches between 1) your company’s assumptions based on operational labels and 2) business-reality. These mismatches typically result in blindness to – sometimes massive – opportunities. We present our findings to you, including any opportunities for how you can profitably generate significant incremental revenue and/or recover money that is being wasted.

As we discover Insights, we work with you to recommend executable strategies and tactics that can be converted into Found Money. To accomplish this, we draw upon our decades of experience working with many scores of companies on thousands of data-based marketing campaigns. Wheaton Group has accumulated extensive know-how in every aspect of data-based marketing. Our expertise extends far beyond simply understanding data — and includes the design and execution of marketing efforts, as well as the inner-workings of operations, distribution channels, and much more.