Convert chaotic data into actionable insight

Data preparation is the process of collecting, combining, structuring, cleaning, transforming, and enriching raw data before warehousing, processing, and analysis. The prepared data can be used in business intelligence, analysis, and data visualization applications.

Reliable data is at the core of modern business enterprise. Businesses collect and store data from multiple sources, and actively use them. But such data captured from different sources tends to suffer from quality issues such as duplicate entries, errors, missing data, and inconsistently captured data. Unreliable data can hurt. It can lead to poor analytics and insights that affect the business' short and mid-term prospects in terms of decision-making. In the long terms, poor data quality can lead to losing out on technologies like Artificial Intelligence that can only be build with well maintained accurate data. Various studies highlight the exorbitant cost of inaccurate data. Data Preparation addresses the core issue of maintaining reliable data. Self-service cloud-based data preparation tools like Zoho DataPrep have democratized data preparation. With it, even non-technical users can run data preparation. Businesses that are keen to have their data game on point will have to factor in data preparation as a critical component.

Data Preparation encompasses multiple steps. Businesses should formulate unique strategies on how they derive value from data. The broad steps are listed below:

• Data integration: Connect to multiple data sources.
• Data modeling: Auto-infer data types and perform data profiling.
• Data cleansing: Improve data quality.
• Data transformation: Transform data to your desired format.
• Data enrichment: Enrich data with machine learning or 3rd party data.
• Data validation: Set custom formats and data types, evaluate data quality, and apply target matching.
• Data pipeline: Set up automated data preparation workflows.
• Data management: Catalog data and manage data assets.
• Data sharing: Secured data sharing, user groups, and collaboration.

Depending on requirements and complexity of data processes, data analysts, data scientists, data engineers or business analysts from Business Intelligence Team use data preparation tools. Traditional data preparation tools - including ones used for processes like ETL - require coding skills. Usually data engineers handle such processes and tools. Modern data preparation tools like Zoho DataPrep have simple drag and drop interface and intuitive processes that even non-technical business users can operate.

Many businesses deal with massive amounts of data from multiple sources, and this data usually has data quality issues. It takes more time, cost, and manual efforts to fix messy data. The result is not always great, and generally error-prone, as data preparation is a laborious work. There are also key challenges, such as data privacy and security, complex tools, and methodologies. However, data preparation software can perform even complex tasks easily using advanced data cleaning, transformation, enirchment and data management features with less time and effort. Data preparation software is a must-have for professionals that deal with a lot of complex data and make data-driven decisions.

Data preparation involves multiple stages. An ideal data preparation tool should be able to clean, transform, enrich and manage data in a secured manner. Here's a quick list of boxes you want to check while evaluating data preparation tools:

• Visually interactive and user-friendly
• Automated workflows
• Integrations with popular data sources and data destinations
• Data privacy and security features
• Data governance and data management features
• Quality product support

No, it's free. Most business owners are excited to hear about all the ways Zoho can help them with their business. For us, that's priceless.

Data preparation tools help reduce the dependency on the Engineering and IT teams to extract data from source, prepare, and provide access for business focused teams to derive insights from. Data scientists and data analysts spend 60% of their time manually cleaning the data. Data preparation tools not only saves time, but also reduces the manual effort in getting huge amounts of data ready. Some of the key benefits include:

• Error-free and reliable data
• Increased data accessibility
• High quality data for accurate insights and well-informed decision-making
• Resource optimization
• Cost-effective
• Efficient data administration

Zoho DataPrep is a self-service data preparation tool that can make data preparation simple with the following features:

• Import data from 50+ data sources
• Export data to 30+ destinations
• Automatic suggestion of transforms based on your data
• Availability of 250 data transforms and AI-based enrichments.
• Automated workflows and data pipelines
• Data security and privacy management