Melissa Data Quality Room for Improvement

GM
Data Architect at World Vision

- Scalability is a limitation as it is single threaded.  You can bypass this limitation by partitioning your data (say by alphabetic ranges) into multiple dataflows but even within a single dataflow the tool starts to really bog down if you are doing survivorship on a lot of columns.  It's just very old technology written that's starting to show its age since it's been fundamentally the same for many years.  To stay relavent they will need to replace it with either ADF or SSIS-IR compliant version.  

- Licensing could be greatly simplified. As soon as a license expires (which is specific to each server) the product stops functioning without prior notice and requires a new license by contacting the vendor. And updating the license is overly complicated. 

- The tool needs to provide resizable forms/windows like all other SSIS windows. Vendor claims its an SSIS limitation but that isn't true since pretty much all SSIS components are resizable except theirs! This is just an annoyance but needless impact on productivity when developing new data flows.

- The tool needs to provide for incremental matching using the MatchUp for SSIS tool (they provide this for other solutions such as standalone tool and MatchUp web service). We had to code our own incremental logic to work around this.

- Tool needs ability to sort mapped columns in the GUI when using advanced survivorship (only allowed when not using column-level survivorship).

- It should provide an option for a procedural language (such as C# or VB) for survivor-ship expressions rather than relying on SSIS expression language.

- It should provide a more sophisticated ability to concatenate groups of data fields into common blocks of data for advanced survivor-ship prioritization (we do most of this in SQL prior to feeding the data to the tool).

- It should provide the ability to only do survivor-ship with no matching (matching is currently required when running data through the tool).

- Tool should provide a component similar to BDD to enable the ability to split into multiple thread matches based on data partitions for matching and survivor-ship rather than requiring custom coding a parallel capable solution.  We broke down customer data by first letter of last name into ranges of last names so we could run parallel data flows.

- Documentation needs to be provided that is specific to MatchUp for SSIS.  Most of their wiki pages were written for the web service API MatchUp Object rather than the SSIS component.

- They need to update their wiki site documentation as much of it is not kept current. Its also very very basic offering very little in terms of guidelines. For example, the tool is single-threaded so getting great performance requires running multiple parallel data flows or BDD in a data flow which you can figure out on your own but many SSIS practitioners aren't familiar with those techniques.

- The tool can hang or crash on rare occasions for unknown reason. Restarting the package resolves the problem. I suspect they have something to do with running on VM (vendor doesn't recommend running on VM) but have no evidence to support it.  When it crashes it creates dump file with just vague message saying the executable stopped running.

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it_user798219 - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager

I cannot think of anything to improve. The products do way more than we take advantage of at this time.

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it_user503892 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Project Manager at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Not in order of importance:

1. Ability to multi-thread. Currently we have to split the data into different paths to try to quicken processing time. In all fairness, we do have a very large customer master to match against.

2. Data types default to ANSI. If you add a column and you have everything else set to Unicode, you sometimes need to either redo the component or do a type conversion step after the output.

2. The ability to resize the selection windows in the components to see the entire field name.

3. Although you can get the component running rather quickly, to do the more complex matching takes more knowledge of the tool. Documentation & videos on the on-premise version is not very helpful. It takes some trial/error to see what the tool is actually doing.

4. License keys gave us problems this past year (previous years were fine). We were sent expired keys and keys that did not match our components. The environment variable does not always pick up so to ensure non-interruption the key needs to be typed in the configuration text files as well.

5. We log SSIS errors and information to assist in abends and audit. We capture only the 110 & 120 messages. If every output stream pin in the MatchUp output filter is not assigned, the SSIS log file fills with "110: Household Process:Warning: The output column "cass_first_name" (49) on output "OLE DB Source Output" (43) and component "Existing Households" (32) is not subsequently used in the Data Flow task. Removing this unused output column can increase Data Flow task performance." for each unused output stream.

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Data Quality
March 2024
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DP
IT Director

An area for improvement is where an end customer's address is not found in the Melissa Data database, even though it is a valid address.

I would like a little more intelligence around handling addresses that are not in the system and providing back some better options on how to present the corrections to the user.

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it_user796209 - PeerSpot reviewer
CS Operations Manager

We would appreciate it if there was a larger database so that we could find information more often. For example, we can search for 10 people and only find the information for three of them, if we are lucky. Increasing this success rate would be beneficial and, at the same time, would be a great way to get more clients interested in the solution.

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GG
COO

None of note, it suits our needs. It could always be cheaper.

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it_user798222 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Data Partnerships at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Address validation and parsing in a few countries have room for improvement.

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it_user503763 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Data Analyst at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Update feature

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it_user793638 - PeerSpot reviewer
Property Investor

It really hasn't given us a phone number for the owner of the property, and that's one thing I'd really like to be getting. Either a phone number or email.

One thing I would want to have, when you're doing a property search, you can do it either on the FIPS in the APN number or the address itself. For some entries, I'll have the APN number, and some I'll have the address. Apparently it cannot process something when both the FIPS-APN and the address are on there. I have to sort, once with one and once with the other, which is a little bit of a pain.

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it_user496830 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Leader at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Need to POC point of entry validation.

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RW
CTO at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

Needs more specific data in a single lookup.

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it_user790491 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Information Technology at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Pricing model.

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it_user796218 - PeerSpot reviewer
Developer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

The billing structure does not seem very accurate. We’ve had issues with miscounted batch records processed. We also ran into some data quality issues, but they have been rectified and we haven’t noticed any issues since.

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it_user150288 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead/Solution Architect at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

It would be great if the product can be expanded to standardize and clean Telephone Numbers and TaxID’s/SSN’s.

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it_user796212 - PeerSpot reviewer
Customer Resource Production Manager at a individual & family service with 5,001-10,000 employees

Provide more phone numbers, even cell numbers (scrubbed numbers).

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it_user223296 - PeerSpot reviewer
Applied Data Science Entrepreneur at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

Better email append coverage (but every vendor struggles with this).

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it_user793653 - PeerSpot reviewer
Administrative Assistant

I wish there was a way to do a "test run" and see what a particular format will give you.

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it_user496779 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Business Intelligence at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Having Customer Primary and Secondary address will help us a lot as some Customers tend to use secondary addresses for business communication.
  • Email Address Soft Ping should be made real time within Personator. 
  • Overall there is a room for improvement in Customer Address Appends and Email Appends.
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it_user798009 - PeerSpot reviewer
Operations and Business Technology Leader at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The world is moving/has moved to the cloud. I get that. But it would be nice to easily integrate the solution with our own internal systems/processes in a way that keeps IT happy. Right now I live at a company with (exceedingly) tight IT policies, so integration of a cloud solution just doesn’t work. The on-premise version of Listware is too expensive relative to the cloud version.

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it_user793635 - PeerSpot reviewer
President

One of the problems that we ran into this year was we probably spent over 40 hours finding and trying to drill down to where specific bugs were in the program, which was a tremendous waste of time for us. There were a couple of updates to Windows this year and the Melissa program kept crashing. It happened on two different occasions over a period of a few months. We were apparently the first firm that noticed it and reported it. They had problems figuring out what the problem was, so we had to drill down and spend a considerable amount of time, proving to them that it wasn't an issue on our end, but that it had something to do with the compatibility on their end with a Windows update. 

Once we told them what the problem was - even though their tech support is great to work with - it literally took probably about two months to fix the issue where we could actually use the program the way we needed to use it. Two months is just too long to solve a problem on a program when we had just purchased the program earlier this year.

When there's a Windows update, they should check the program in detail to see if there are going to be any conflicts with that update, instead of waiting for their clients to spend countless hours solving the problem of why the program is crashing.

Also, it would be nice to be able to do a merge/purge of larger data sets. What I mean by larger data sets, data sets in the terabytes, without any crashing issues. But from talking to tech support, it's probably as good as it's going to get.

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it_user519417 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect (Data Scientist) at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

The use case I'm familiar with is for a merchant who was contrasting this technology with data from Dun and Bradstreet: so my recommendation is that Melissa Data purchase Dun and Bradstreet to combine their data breadth.

Both services have complementary but not identical databases: functionally, people should contact the sales teams at both organizations, see what trial they can get and to what degree the data satisfies their use case.

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it_user498804 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Solutions Architect at a real estate/law firm with 501-1,000 employees

License tracking.

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it_user798006 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees

There are some companies out there using Google or other sources to check/confirm if addresses are residential. If Melissa is not doing this, that could be an improvement.

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it_user793617 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Platform Operations at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Validating more addresses accurately.

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it_user793656 - PeerSpot reviewer
Executive Director at a non-tech company with 11-50 employees

Once a list is processed it gives a report, which is great. However, if there was a section with report history, that would be very helpful.

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it_user793647 - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Specialist / Senior Business Analyst

Since we only use one service, and that is only to obtain the NAICS code on a company, the only suggestion is to continually update the database with NAICS codes on businesses.

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it_user791220 - PeerSpot reviewer
Office Services Manager at a government with 51-200 employees

It will mix up family members at times, so we will change addresses at times that shouldn’t be changed.

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it_user790494 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Software Development

The SSIS component setup seems a little klunky, but otherwise the product does what I expect.

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it_user467340 - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner /CEO at a consultancy with 501-1,000 employees

It changes names to what it thinks it should be when the spelling is different. It should not do this.

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it_user793650 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager of Application Development (Web Team) at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Further improved address data.

Also, I'd generally prefer an API-based solution going forward, and one that does fraud verification at the same time.

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it_user796215 - PeerSpot reviewer
Mailing Specialist

It would be helpful if a list of the codes and explanations could be included.

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WK
Director at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

We have noticed that some of the emails and addresses return with confusing or incorrect codes, but for the most part, it is accurate.

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it_user793632 - PeerSpot reviewer
Retired

Many issues, sometimes I have to completely log out and start over.

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it_user793629 - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Design Consultant

More countries should be supported by Melissa.

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it_user793659 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Processing Supervisor at a printing company with 51-200 employees

Better results in parsing, as described on the website.

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it_user793614 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a tech company with 51-200 employees
  • More/better search tools are needed.
  • State and local tax data would be nice.
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it_user793620 - PeerSpot reviewer
President at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Speed of delivery/ease of use. They advertise a 24-hour, next business day turn time on data annotation, but I’ve found it is usually closer to 72 hours. This is still excellent, just make sure you add in the appropriate fluff to your delivery timelines. 

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it_user793623 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Solutions at a tech company with 51-200 employees

MatchUp is a more complex product and I recommend a test area before upgrading to production. Performance can change from version to version.

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Buyer's Guide
Data Quality
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about Melissa, Informatica, Experian and others in Data Quality. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.