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The amount of data has increased immensely following the digital transformation of our society, and consequently so has the need to manage it. At the same time, this influx of data in various company systems has become both a challenge and an opportunity for organisations today
A core aspect of a successful Data Management strategy is to prioritise the data that is most critical to the business and focus efforts around this before doing anything else. This business-critical data — the “master data” — is often scattered and siloed in diverse systems, and it needs to be centralised, structured and quality assured before it can be fully capitalised on. By working strategically with this data in your company, and with an MDM system in place, you can optimise the management and the value of your master data.
Master data can be people, places, and things that interact to create the process of “doing business”. Master data is a collective term for the information about these “entities” that provides context to business transactions. Master data can be product data, customer data, supplier data, etc., that is critical to a particular organisation – i.e., business-critical data. It is shared in several business processes and systems across the company.
Master Data Management, MDM, is about centralising your master data, organising yourself, defining workflows, and automating processes in a way that drives the business forward. By creating a “Single Source of Truth”, organisations benefit from improved data quality, faster time to market, improved customer experience, and the necessary business agility to stay competitive. MDM creates a collaboration platform for safe and efficient sharing of more and better data. You enable data transparency for secure access to more and correct data for better analytics and data-driven insights – so that you can scale and grow your business sustainably.
Many companies struggle with duplicate records, a situation that can result in bad customer experiences, an unsustainable number of returns, loss of upsell opportunities, time-consuming data cleansing, and actual risk of fraud and personal data violations. Still, you can’t just delete records — they exist for specific business reasons. Data has owners who need to access the information in different relationships, and it’s not apparent which record is the most trusted, complete, or updated. Customer data, for example, can be found in different applications (ERP, CRM, etc), which makes it challenging to know which version to trust. Deduplicating and merging different business views into one creates a Golden Record that can provide you with a trusted view and definition to share across channels. So as an organisation, you have use for both a “Single Source” of data as well as a “Single View” (a Golden Record) across multiple lines of business, for differing purposes.
A good MDM solution prevents data silos and creates data transparency, but modern MDM platforms also help companies rapidly adapt to new buyer preferences, customer demands, and compliance requirements — they increase your business agility. To meet these requirements quickly enough, you need an MDM platform that can scale — in terms of data amount, types of data, and capabilities that support your digital transformation. For some, it may mean starting with a single domain, like a product, to work with product information (PIM) and, over time, add customer data, supplier data, assets, and sustainability data (multidomain MDM). For others, it means having the flexibility to deploy products and services in the cloud, creating a collaborative data platform for PXM, integrating with both internal and external data sources, and creating a “hub”, or a solid foundation to start working with AI and machine learning (ML).
At Nexer, we believe in strategic partnerships and putting your business first. We will recommend a solution that gives you not only a competitive edge in your industry but tools to drive the development of your digital success and deliver on your MDM strategy.
We have been partners with Stibo Systems since 2011.
Stibo Systems Enterprise Master Data Management platform STEP is scalable for your future business needs and supports multi-domain Master Data Management.
Using the solution’s accelerators, companies of any size and complexity can centralise their master data, data models, and business processes on the same dynamic, user-friendly platform. The MDM platform has native certified connections for most major enterprise systems, as well as point-and-click configurable integration for XML, JSON, CSV, Excel, JMS, REST API, or microservices.
We have extensive experience of MDM and can help you set up a successful strategy for your data management. We design and implement solutions and create integration with the systems needed. Our methods are based on many years of experience in consulting and implementing MDM and PIM in various industries for many companies in different countries. We work with Husqvarna, SKF, Ahlsell, Mekonomen, Chick Fil A, Walmart, KGK, Thule Group and others globally.
Our analysis is business process driven and we believe in an agile configuration and implementation approach. We are convinced that to design the best possible solution, we must first analyse and define the relevant business and data processes together with the customer.
We often see Master Data Governance (all data governance, in fact) as an administration and compliance overhead. However, Master Data Governance directly impacts the business’s ability to grow and achieve new goals. Clear policies and rules for acquisition, storage, management, and sharing of master data are needed, along with definition and standards. But these policies also need to be understood and enforced. A strategy for Master Data Governance must encompass people and processes, just as your MDM strategy should include organisation, processes, and systems. Of course IT programs can support Data Governance, and an MDM system holds all the capabilities necessary. Still, it can only apply rules already defined in advance by an organisation – that is, people. The system can identify deviations from the standards and provide tools for measuring data quality. But it is when the rules are established that a system can help you deliver on your data strategy.
Where is data stored, where does it flow, and who needs it? And who can change it? You must apply data collection, classification, and quality control first. Master Data Governance means an agreed terminology and particular metadata attributes to define, for example, ‘customer’ to provide a standard and consistent definition – i.e., a “Single View”. In that sense, your Master Data Management and your data governance framework are mutually dependent.
In need of an experienced and knowledgeable partner? Reach out and one of our MDM specialists will get back to you.