How Master Data Management Brings Evolution to the Core of Business?

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Poor data quality is leading to losses of around $15 million. Today’s complex enterprise data environments are full of multiple information silos of fragmented, poor quality, non-standardized data. This causes a debilitating impact on the overall management and enterprise decision-making. What’s more, 175 zettabytes of new data is expected to be created by 2025. And by 2024, the ratio of unique data to replicated data will be 1:10. It means that the complexities of data management are set to intensify manifold.

That’s where a Master Data Management (MDM) strategy can come to rescue. It doesn’t just guarantee easy access to high-quality data, flexibility, streamlined processes, automated workflows, compliance, integration, and synchronization. MDM also nudges organizations to address questions around vision, strategy, building business capabilities, and increasing profitability. It ensures uniformity, structuredness, accuracy, stewardship, and accountability of shared master data assets necessary for all business-critical functions with:

  • Enhanced analytics and business intelligence
  • Greater customer satisfaction and retention
  • Improved product management
  • Reinforce fraud prevention
  • Increased employee productivity and regulatory compliance
  • Simplified procurement processes and supplier onboarding
  • Optimized sales and marketing with improved up-selling and cross-selling

More than just a technical solution, MDM is a business enabler. Here’s how.

Connects Any and Every System

Scattered across disparate locations, systems, and applications, master data is hard to find and structure. This can lead to unnecessary complications as myriad stakeholders across the value chain try to own and manage data creating many versions. With the slightest of inaccuracy, a domino effect of information catastrophe can occur, contaminating analytics and communications. MDM can enable inter-domain associations and connect departments like suppliers, product teams, sales, and marketing with a single view of all the datasets formatted to industry standards. Simply put, it sources data from everywhere, cleanses and processes it, while allowing easy access to everyone. This eliminates siloed versions, duplications, redundancies, and inaccuracies. Systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Order Management Systems (OMS), Content Management System (CMS), and even Supply Chain Management (SCM) can become interconnected with a more reliable foundation of data leading to higher enterprise productivity and overall output.

Enhances Customer Experiences

94% of businesses suspect that their customer data is inaccurate, leading to wastage of hundreds of person-hours that went into gathering that data. The worst part of this data problem is the impact on the brand-customer relationships, which can be stained forever. Customers of the digital age need on-demand accessibility of correct and relevant information across channels. If an organization fails to deliver on any of these needs, it will risk its credibility. The significance of data in customer experience increases even more if the domain is critical, e.g., healthcare-related data, finance, or even technical specifications of many products. MDM can serve customers by presenting them accurate, updated data across multiple regions and customer facing sales channels. Enterprise can help visualize 360-degree data surrounding customers, derive actionable insights and deliver immersive experiences. MDM can be highly instrumental in targeted campaigns, predictive analytics, omnichannel outreach, and proactive cross-selling and upselling.

Improves Partner Management

Every organization has a unique network of partners. Partner ecosystems can be composed of suppliers, third-party vendors, Independent Service Providers (ISPs), contactors, and likewise. A big part of managing these partner associations is dependent on communicating accurate, timely data. Providing a centralized view of data that is updated and standardized can result in effective collaboration. MDM can amplify acceleration and agility by boosting the association between partners, and integrating disconnected processes to improve performance, streamline workflows, and reduce risks. With MDM, partners can refine their definitions, document their shared metadata, and review how discrepancies in the data influence day-to-day operations. They can also leverage user-friendly data interfaces to identify new engagement opportunities. MDM establishes an authoritative form of truth with a golden data repository that reduces operational risks and contradictions. It improves data sharing and usability with data validation and completeness.

Ensures Reporting and Insights

According to Forrester, “nearly one-third of business analysts spend over 40% of their time vetting and validating their analytics data” before strategic decision-making. Even if the data is correct and processed to reflect valuable insights – it cannot truly be of use if the business cannot understand the format or visualize it on analytical dashboards. Reporting of the data is as important as compiling it and sorting it out. MDM can help this function with better reporting, compliance, and monitoring. . Decision-makers can swiftly analyze processes, draw inferences to examine trends, optimize productivity, complement vendor collaboration, and improve customer services. The real-time reports can be formatted for different departments for seamless accessibility and immediate results. Besides driving productivity, these insights lend themselves effortlessly to optimal assessment of risks, opportunities, enterprise strategies and long-term visions.

Enables Strong Data Governance

Data revolving around the development of new products, approaches, or any other intellectual need must be securely handled. Businesses need to govern their data traffic not just for security and compliance but also for quick results and easy administration. Enterprise MDM is the answer to all data governance needs as it accumulates data from numerous data entry points and consolidates it into a ‘golden record’. And once the data is consolidated, the data governance council within the enterprise lays out a data governance structure by formulating policies and allocating roles and responsibilities. With this, employees at various levels, get appropriate clearances, accordingly (keeping the sensitive nature of data in mind). MDM delivers on the five main governance principles – accuracy (efficiently reflect the truth), consistency (map onto a preconceived pattern), completeness (include critical information), uniqueness (minimize cases of duplication), and timeliness (update information dynamically).

Conclusion

Suboptimal data management can have drastic consequences. But with MDM, tangible benefits like standardized semantics, consolidated metadata, and most critically, data quality improvement are possible. With the synergy of high-quality data and smart analytics, businesses can use MDM to exploit information for optimal use.

Rajneesh Kumar
Rajneesh Kumar is Director, Marketing at Pimcore GmbH. He is developing the marketing plans. Operationally he is responsible for the marketing program and driving business outcomes. He builds data-driven decision-making frameworks – customer segmentation, Go to Market strategy, targeting, cross-sell/up–sell. Pimcore is an open-source platform for product information management (PIM/MDM), digital asset management (DAM), content management system (CMS), and eCommerce.

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