Driving Accurate
Demand Forecasting
Implementing MDM to create business-ready data for more accurate demand forecasting
Name: Lexmark
Headquarters: Lexington, KY, USA
Industry: Printers and Printing Services
Customer: Since 2023
Data Types Mastered with Profisee
- Customer data
- Printer installation location data
- Servicing vendor data
Founded in 1991, Lexmark creates cloud-enabled imaging and internet of things (IoT) technology products, services and solutions for organizations around the world, spanning industries such as manufacturing, retail, healthcare, government and financial services. Known for manufacturing printers and pioneering print management services, Lexmark also offers AI-driven Optra technology solutions to help organizations operate more efficiently and securely and quickly realize value from their data.
With corporations adopting more remote and hybrid work policies, selling additional devices is no longer a viable growth strategy for Lexmark. To grow revenue, Lexmark pivoted to optimizing the usage and placement of each print device. However, with placements in 170 countries serviced by a myriad of third-party vendors, this optimization effort proved to be complex.
A substantial portion of Lexmark’s revenue comes from print supplies. For this reason, Lexmark puts a high priority on fulfilling customer supply needs in a timely manner. Delays in correct supply fulfillment impact customer satisfaction, leading customers to turn to third-party vendors for supplies or possibly churn to a competitor. Occasional delays in correct supply delivery also reduce total annual and monthly print volume per device, further impacting print supply revenue.
To increase page prints per device and demand for supplies, Lexmark developed custom machine learning algorithms in its Databricks Lakehouse to more accurately forecast supply demand and pre-ship the necessary supplies to their third-party device support vendors.
These algorithms use IoT data from installed devices to forecast demand for supplies at each installation, but challenging information — such as device installation location — and incorrect linkages between devices and third-party vendors impeded these efforts. Lexmark knew something had to change.
To support ML-based demand forecasting, Lexmark needed timely and reliable information on customers’ corporate hierarchies down to the installation locations as well as relationships to third-party printer management vendors supporting the installations. This required a software solution capable of both hierarchy and many-to-many relationship management.
Lexmark had a legacy master data management (MDM) solution for managing customer and device installation locations, but this system was highly customized, no longer supported and inflexible to meet Lexmark’s evolving needs without a massive investment. For this reason, Lexmark selected Profisee for its cost-effective SaaS license model and robust support for Lexmark’s complex mastering needs.
THE SOLUTION
Information on customer and device installation location resides across multiple siloed systems at Lexmark, including SAP, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Oracle Siebel. Lexmark aggregates data from these sources into Profisee, where data stewards match and merge the records to create golden customer and device installation location records.
From there, Lexmark verifies and standardizes location information with Profisee’s built-in address verification capabilities and masters third-party vendors, linking them to customers and device installation locations through many-to-many relationships. With golden location records for its customers and device installation locations, Lexmark sends data from Profisee downstream to its Databricks Lakehouse for use in demand forecasting algorithms to more accurately ship supplies in advance to the right customers or third-party service providers.
THE WINS
Equipped with Profisee MDM, Lexmark improved the quality of its customer, location and servicing vendor data that its ML platform requires, reducing the data wrangling workload of their data science team of over 40 people significantly.
More importantly, line of business owners estimate that in one year, Lexmark realized $2 million in combined revenue and savings from its North America operation by having the right supplies, at the right location, at the right time. Lexmark plans to expand this solution to EMEA and APAC markets, which will further increase the revenue impact of its choice of Profisee for master data management.
“We have already realized about $2 million in cost savings in the last twelve months by being able to have 360-degree customer data tied back to the usage of that specific data.”
Sr. Manager, Lexmark
Read additional case studies
