Abstract:
Background: In developing countries, despite large public companies’ reliance on master data for
decision-making, there is scant evidence to demonstrate their effective use of transactional data
in decision-making because of its volatility and complexity. For the state-owned enterprise (SOE)
studied, the complexity of generating high-quality transactional data manifests in relationships
between customer call transactional data related to an electricity supply problem (captured by
call centre agents, i.e. data creators) and technician-generated feedback (i.e. data consumers).
Objectives: To establish the quality of customer calls transactional data captured using source
system measurements. To compare this data set with field technicians’ downstream system
transactions that indicated incorrect transactional data.
Method: The study compared historical customer calls transactional data (i.e. source system
data) with field technician-generated feedback captured on work orders (i.e. receiving system)
in a power generation SOE, to ascertain transactional data quality generated and whether field
technicians responded to authentic customer calls exclusively to mitigate operational expenses.
Results: Mean values of customer call transactional data quality from the source system and
technician-generated feedback on work orders varied by 1.26%, indicating that data quality
measurements at the source system closely resembled data quality experiences of data
consumers. The SOE’s transactional data quality from the source system was 80.05% and that
of historical data set from evaluating feedback was 81.31% – percentages that exceeded average
data quality measurements in literature.
Conclusion: Using a feedback control system (FCS) to integrate feedback generated by data
consumers to data creators presents an opportunity to increase data quality to higher levels
than its current norm.
