What is Zoho DataPrep?

Data preparation, or more commonly data wrangling is the process of collecting, combining, structuring, cleaning, transforming, and enriching your data.

If your business deals with data collected from multiple sources and you find it difficult to manage huge chunks of data everyday, you need a reliable data wrangling tool. The need to convert ever-increasing volumes of unstructured data into actionable insights is driving organizations to rethink their approach to preparing data. It is estimated that data preparation alone accounts for 80% of the time spent in making business decisions (Source: The New York Times). Most data wrangling activities are routine, tedious, time-consuming and require coding expertise to perform manually, but can be automated. This is where Zoho DataPrep can help you.

Let's say your company uses a CRM software to process sales data. The data has got issues like duplicate entries of your leads and invalid contact details. You have no option but to manually fix them for an ideal customer relationship management. Let's look into some frequently faced issues: missing data, duplicate data, old or redundant data, compliance, and data management issues. These issues can potentially affect your business. The conventional approach to fixing these issues could take days to weeks and require coding expertise depending on the complexity involved. But imagine resolving your issues in a matter of seconds with just a few clicks.

Here's what Zoho DataPrep can do to help you,

1. Missing data - Suppose you collect feedback from your customers. They could miss out on a few details and this could lead to incomplete entries in your system. With Zoho DataPrep can use the Fill empty cells transform to fill in the required data or you can filter and delete the missing data. 
   
2. Duplicate data - Having multiple data sources and manually entering data  may lead to duplicate data most of the time.  Zoho DataPrep  can effortlessly help you find and remove duplicate rows and columns using the Deduplicate transform.
   
3. Old or redundant data - Sometimes you could be processing redundant data that is of no use to your business. You need to do manual audits regularly to tackle this problem. With Zoho DataPrep, you can simply set up import and export schedules to ensure that your data is always up to date.
   
4. Compliance issues - It is crucial to maintain confidentiality when you collect personal information like phone number and Email ID. Zoho DataPrep is GDPR compliant and handles personal data securely. Personal data is protected using encryption at rest, data masking, and tokenization.
   
5. Data management - Data management is as significant as data preparation. But it can be challenging if you have huge volumes of data. The Data cataloging feature in Zoho DataPrep helps with easy data management and data discovery based on the usage of data assets, their status, and associated meta information.
   
6. Increased time consumption - The fundamental issue with data preparation is the increased time consumption. Automating mundane tasks is the quickest way to reduce time with data preparation. With Zoho DataPrep you can schedule data preparation workflows and receive alerts.