Geberit receives CDQ good practice award for excellence in data management

Geberit has won this year’s award for its exemplary approach of establishing an end-to-end assortment management concept together with a highly effective product information management system. Meanwhile all the product managers of the Group, plus 29 sales companies, are using the new system, the content of which can be translated into 34 languages. As of this year, product catalogs can be created with maximum efficiency and resilience against errors, as the content can easily and quickly be compiled using the catalog software. 

By establishing direct interfaces for daily data exchange with the SAP system, timeliness of data could substantially be enhanced and undesired redundancy reduced. Furthermore, workflows were directly integrated into the management application to improve the support of processes and establish measurement capabilities. Geberit also showed a web version of their future, serverless product catalog, where data is fed directly from the source systems (e.g. STEP, SAP).

“Data can be compared to rough diamonds; it has to be ‘cut’ and ‘grinded’ to become real gems. If data then is well-structured and standardized, it offers such an enormous potential. All the work from previous years now pays off, as we have been able to exploit this potential for some time now. But our diamonds still need further processing, so there is still a lot of work ahead of us. Winning the CDQ Good Practice Award is a great acknowledgment of our achievements so far, which makes us feel very proud and thankful to everybody contributing to this great success story”, said Stefano Giacomello (IT Manager PDM at Geberit).

“For the fifth consecutive year, the CDQ Good Practice Award acknowledges world-class initiatives in data management that can be considered exemplary in this endeavor,“ said Prof. Dr. Christine Legner, head of the CC CDQ. “The four finalists presented different facets of excellent data management – from initial establishment of enterprise-wide data management to very targeted initiatives and projects for a better support of marketing and sales activities using quality product and customer information.”

Joining Geberit in this year’s final round of the competition were ABB, a technology leader in the fields of electrification products, robotics and motion, industrial automation, and power grids, presenting their master data management program initiated in 2013; Bayer, the global enterprise with core competencies in the Life Science fields of health care and agriculture, showcasing their integrated metadata and data quality management approach supporting marketing and sales; and Deutsche Bank, Germany’s leading bank and financial service provider, outlining how they established a common language for identifying, analyzing and eliminating data quality problems. The international jury, consisting of data management experts from research and practice, and the CC CDQ Community, finally ranked Geberit‘s good practice top and declared the Swiss company the winner of the 2017 CDQ Good Practice Award.

About Geberit

Geberit is a globally operating group employing over 12,000 people in 50 countries. The company is the European market leader in the field of sanitary products. As an integrated group, Geberit has a strong local presence in the majority of countries across Europe, offering a USP both with regard to sanitary technology and bathroom ceramics. The group is headquartered in Rapperswil-Jona (Switzerland) and operates more than 30 production facilities.

About the CDQ Good Practice Award

The CDQ Good Practice Award was launched in 2013 as a joint initiative of the Competence Center Corporate Data Quality (CC CDQ) and the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) for acknowledging world-class corporate data management initiatives. As in the previous years, the good practices submitted by the participating organizations were evaluated by an international jury of data management experts. As opposed to the previous competitions, the four companies that made it into the final round of the competition presented their good practices also to the CC CDQ community.

The international jury of the 2017 competition consisted of the following renowned researchers and practitioners in the field of corporate data management:

• Dr. Dr. Sven Wenzel (Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering, ISST)
• Prof. Dr. Andy Koronios (University of South Australia)
• Jodi Maciejewski (American User Group – Data Governance SIG)
• Dr. Geert Opdenbosch (EFQM)
• Dr. Philip Woodall (University of Cambridge)
• Lwanga Yonke (International Association for Information and Data Quality)
• Andreas Schierning (Data Management Expert)

In addition, the good practices of the four finalists were evaluated by the members of the CC CDQ community.

About EFQM

EFQM is a not-for-profit membership foundation with 25 years of experience in supporting organizations achieve sustainable excellence. With its carefully designed portfolio of products and a network of approximately 30,000 organizations of any size and from all industries, EFQM is recognized by institutions and acknowledged by leaders as a key partner to success. EFQM is also the custodian of the EFQM Excellence Model, a non-prescriptive framework created by a team of experts from industry and academia that can be used to gain a holistic view of any organization, regardless of size, industry, or level of maturity.