What is Data Preparation?
Data preparation is the process of collecting, cleaning, and consolidating data into one file or data table, primarily for use in analysis.
The Key Steps to Data Preparation
Access Data
Access data from any source – no matter the origin, format or narrative. Altair® Monarch® excels at intelligently and automatically extracting data from complex unstructured and semi-structured sources, like PDFs. Increased access to data means less manual work, faster insights and faster time to value realized by your organization.
Cleaning Data and Improving Data Quality
Manual data prep is error-prone, time-consuming and costly. Business decisions rely on analytics. But, if the data is inaccurate or incomplete, your analytics inform wrong businesses decisions. Bad analytics means poor business decisions. Monarch is programmed with over 80 pre-built data preparation functions to speed up arduous data cleansing projects.
Blending and Reconciling Data
Multiple, disconnected systems house your organization’s accounting data, customer and sales activity, employee information, and more. Likely your Marketing team alone probably has at least 6 systems they are trying to reconcile data from. Trying to blend data at this scale in Excel requires advanced knowledge of macros, functions and/or VLOOKUPS. Plus, it’s not very repeatable. Leveraging automation to blend data is a game-changer for saving time, effort and errors. Monarch’s click-to-join capabilities to enhance your data, tell a compelling story about the business and use that story for actionable reporting and analytics
Transforming and Instantly Re-Formatting Data
Being able to quickly change the way data is summarized and presented enables business analysts and executives to quickly consider different perspectives and views of data. Monarch make it easy to package your clean and blended data for insightful reporting you can confidently share with the rest of your organization.
Exporting and Using Your Data
Once data is all cleaned up, blended and enriched for analytics, it needs to be sent somewhere. Being able to export to any common platform makes it easy to maximize investments you’ve made in other BI tools and drive insight through your entire organization. Monarch allows you to leverage pre-defined exports to specific file formats, databases or visualization tools from the Monarch interface.
Expanding Your Connectivity
Every company has a unique technology stack. Enabling you to be flexible with your data connections simplifies your ability to create valuable analytics, based on all of your organization’s data. Monarch comes equipped pre-configured data connections for data sources such as Excel, CSV, PDF, relational databases, and more. It is also equipped with ODBC and OLE DB drivers, connectors to Big Data sources such as Hadoop, and other data connectors and drivers.
Repeating Tasks with Automation
Most reports are generated from the same systems on a monthly or quarterly basis. Without automation, business analysts are performing the same data preparation steps, exporting the finalized reports to the same format and sending them to the same group of people. Monarch can automatically perform this in seconds, rather than hours or days. Rather than spending time tediously re-formatting data and repeatedly generating reports, analysts are free to explore their data and find brand new insights to create value for their organization.
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Altair® Monarch®
Monarch is a market leading desktop-based self-service data preparation solution. Monarch connects to multiple data sources including structured and unstructured data, cloud-based data, and big data. Connecting to data, cleansing and manipulating data requires no coding.
Monarch can quickly convert disparate data formats into rows and columns for use in data analytics. Over 80 pre-built data preparation functions mean data preparation tasks can be completed quickly and error free. More time is spent on generating value from data as opposed to making data usable to begin with.
Featured Resources
Altair Monarch: Enterprise-Class Data Transformation
Altair Monarch is a comprehensive, self-service data transformation and process automation solution. It connects directly to a wide range of structured and semi-structured data sources, including PDFs, text, complex spreadsheets, JSON, XML, big data sources, relational databases, and many others. Business users and analysts can extract, cleanse, and transform data into consistent, governed, and secure rows and columns without specialized knowledge or training, and without writing any code. The platform includes more than 80 pre-built data preparation functions which makes it easy to build new error-free workflows in minutes.
Experience no-code, automated data transformation: Try Altair Monarch today, for free.
Streamline Audit Processes with Self-Service Data Preparation
Auditors are under significant pressure to keep expenditures down whether they work for an external audit firm or are part of an internal audit team. Achieving cost-effective audits requires organizations to do more with less - while maintaining or increasing audit quality. To succeed auditors not only need the right expertise and process but also the right data analytics tools.
Enhancing Your RPA Investment With Data Preparation
As more businesses use Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as a means to streamline operations and assess efficiency gaps, there are hurdles to fully realizing its benefits. For instance, existing data is often challenging for RPA processes to handle. Without a good solution, studies indicate that 80% of the time spent on RPA has to do with data preparation.
Discover how you can enhance your ongoing RPA investment with the right data analytics stack.
